• Question: What have you enjoyed working on the most in epidemiology and why?

    Asked by Hannah to Kevin, Liz, Beccy, Rosie on 9 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 9 Jun 2017:

      Being able to play a part is something as monumental as the control of Ebola in West Africa is definitely the most rewarding.

      I’ve also been able to work with some really amazing scientists – including Sir Roy Anderson and Sir David Cox. They were both my mentors.

      To demonstrate the scale of the challenge controlling the West African Ebola epidemic consider that there were over 20,000 cases of Ebola and over 10,000 deaths but if not for international control efforts, it could have been much worse. I am not a medic – I can’t help individual patients but I can help understand how the disease is spreading, whether it is getting better or worse and what control measures are working best.

    • Photo: Kevin Pollock

      Kevin Pollock answered on 9 Jun 2017:

      I have enjoyed working on the impact of the HPV vaccine on HPV-driven cancers – these include cervical, vulvovaginal and head and neck cancers. In Scotland, we can link datasets and see which women have been vaccinated, when they attend for the first smear and whether the vaccine reduces the HPV infection (which can lead to cancer). Our data suggest that the vaccine is associated with a 90% reduction in cancerous HPV infections. This is great news, especially as it seems to do better in those women from more deprived areas, where the burden of cervical cancer is highest.

    • Photo: Rosie Fok

      Rosie Fok answered on 10 Jun 2017:

      The epidemiology I work on most is on a small scale / local level. For example, working with the hospital’s infection control nurses to find out how a specific infection might be spreading from patient to patient. Then we put measures in place to stop the spread. This might be as simple as reminding people to wash their hands, or changing the way the basin on the ward is used.

    • Photo: Liz Buckingham-Jeffery

      Liz Buckingham-Jeffery answered on 11 Jun 2017:

      I have only worked in epidemiology for a few years, and in that time I’ve mostly worked on one project about norovirus. (Norovirus is an illness which causes vomiting and diarrhoea.) So I guess that has been my favourite project to work on so far! But within that project, the part I enjoy the most is probably writing computer programmes.

      Epidemiologists use computer programmes for lots of things. I’ll explain just one example. Pretend, for example, that we have a new vaccine. We want to know whether if we can just vaccinate children this will be enough to stop most of the disease. Because the vaccine is expensive so we can’t give it to everyone. But we obviously can’t do an experiment on a real group of people! So we can write a computer programme that includes important things about how diseases spread in real life, and see what happens when we ‘vaccinate’ the ‘population’ in the computer programme.

      I enjoy writing these computer programmes because it is just a big, logical problem solving puzzle. And that is the kind of thing I enjoy. I like logic puzzles, I think my brain just works that way!

Comments