• Question: have you ever worked on any particularly dangerous epidemics? if so which ones

    Asked by anon-186214 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 10 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Raquel Medialdea Carrera

      Raquel Medialdea Carrera answered on 10 Nov 2018:

      That’s an interesting question!
      I have worked in Sierra Leona (Africa) during the Ebola Virus Outbreak. I was working in a Ebola Hospital in a small city that was particularly affected by the epidemic.

      I have also worked in Brazil during two years during the Zika Virus and Chikungunya Virus epidemic. Both Zika and Chikungunya are viruses that spread using mosquitoes and have caused really big problems in South America. However, these epidemics were not as dangerous as, the way to protect me was to avoid getting bitten by mosquitoes.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I work on the West African Ebola epidemic (the one Raquel is talking about!) but I stay on the computer and use data that was collected by other people during the outbreak. There was no danger to me, but a lot of very brave people died trying to help stop that epidemic.

    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I’ve never has to work on any dangerous epidemics. I work with diseases that tend to be a problem all year round rather than in outbreak form. Despite this however, lots of the work scientists do on other diseases helps towards better understanding and treating outbreak cases so in a way many scientists have indirectly contributed towards dealing with epidemics.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      I research sexually transmitted infections, which are in general endemic diseases. This means the number of cases year round is roughly the same. So I don’t really work with epidemics, which are characterised by large increases in the number of new cases of a disease in a small amount of time.

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