Day 2: Wednesday, June 17

Val Beasley gave us an introductory lecture in the morning, talking about the various drivers of ecosystem disease, and the general organization of the course. Kirsten Gilardi then spoke about climate change and biodiversity. Aaron Bernstein, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, talked about the links between human health and the environment, especially zoonotic disease. This lecture was particularly interesting to me, and brought me back to the class I took in undergrad on emerging infectious diseases and the environment.
Dr. Bernstein's talk got me to thinking about the role of veterinarians in zoonotic disease research, prevention, and treatment. He mentioned that these outbreaks are extremely hard to predict, which makes practicing preventative medicine quite difficult. On the other hand, simply responding to outbreaks as they occur doesn't seem like a very efficient way to practice medicine. I also talked to him a little bit about the interaction between veterinarians and human doctors in this field. He thought that vets may have a better background and are ideally situated to understand emerging zoonoses--more so than human doctors--but to me it seems like we sort of gloss over zoonotic disease potential, and focus only on the effects that infectious diseases can have on specific animal populations. This is an area of interest for me, and I think I'd like to spend more time thinking about the research that can be done integrating disease surveying and health assessments in different wildlife populations.

Later in the day we got some free time to start working on our group projects. My group--Boris, Reti, Fidy, Mike, and myself--met in the pool to start discussing ideas, and came up with an idea to create an ecotourism destination as a method of preserving Amazonian rainforest. Maybe not the most original idea in the world, but hopefully we can integrate some more unique features, like using locally grown food sources, and making the rates economically accessible for "regular people" instead of the super wealthy.



The pool outside our room during the thunderstorm that woke me up this morning.