Sunday June 20 WILDLIFE EPIDEMIOLOGY AND DISEASE MODELING

Happy Fathers Day to my dad and to Pat!

Since today was all lecture, most of today’s photos are from yesterday…

7:30 am: Breakfast

8:30 – 10:00 am: Wildlife Epidemiology and Risk Assessment

Presenter: Jonna Mazet, UC Davis Wildlife Health Center

Mazet introduced principles of wildlife epidemiology and risk assessment as they pertain to real-world problems and projects in wildlife conservation and ecosystem health.

10:15 am – 12:00 pm: Population and Disease Modeling

Presenter: Phil Miller, Conservation Breeding Specialist Group

Miller develops, tests, and applies computer-based models for risk assessment and decision making for wildlife conservation. These models, which focus on small population biology, conservation biology, human demography, social learning, and threats to sustainability including infectious diseases, have been developed to produce realistic management recommendations to prevent extinction of endangered species.

12:00 pm: Lunch

1:00– 4:00 pm: Epidemiology / Risk Assessment and Management Exercise

Leads: Mazet and Miller

We spent the afternoon in a group-based exercise to develop skills needed for outbreak investigation, epidemiologic modeling, risk assessment and risk reduction. I was in a group with Jon (New York), Amanda (Colorado), Wilson (Tanzania), Sridhar (India), and Ademola (Nigeria). We worked through a problem that occurred several years ago on Catalina Island dealing with a distemper outbreak in the local fox population.

4:00 – 5:30 : Introduction to Envirovet 2010 in Tanzania

Presenter: Jonna Mazet, UC Davis Wildlife Health Center

Mazet provided a glimpse of our time in Tanzania: the schedule, logistics, the people we will meet, and the sites and projects the course will visit.

7:00 pm: Dinner

After dinner most of us made a quick stop at the bar before heading to the pool. Nate and I taught our classmates how to play three-fly’s up and we all messed around in the pool for a while before heading to bed.