Peter's Blog: May 2007

Here are some pictures of two trips during the month of April. The first is from a State Park west of Nashville where I went to the Tennessee Water Resources Symposium. I learned a lot about water resource issues in Tennessee and Kentucky, and heard some stories of houses disappearing into sink holes. The rest of the pictures are from an overnight field trip to the CDC in Atlanta with a seminar class called "Pathogens in Hydrology" from UT. We met some like minded people at the CDC trying to understand the movement of pathogens in surface and subsurface waters, and I was blown away by how modern and clean everything was.

There is a book by Lori Garret called "The coming Plague" (1996), that describes the early year of the CDC, when there were "Disease Cowboys" trotting the globe discovering new deadly outbreaks of Hemorrhagic Fever (e.g. Ebola or Lassa Virus) and risking their own lives to find an etiologic agent and/or a vector (something carrying that agent) before the whole village is wiped out. One of the conclusions of her book is that during the bubonic plague in Europe each time the plague spread west ward from eastern Europe it took many months to arrive in Britain. This was related to speed of travel. Today, a highly infective virus would be spread to every major city in the world in three days, giving organizations like the CDC almost no time to react. It’s easy to see why the CDC is such an important institution for us all (even Canadians), nevertheless I like being at a University where we are some steps removed from all the tyrannous politics.