It's very difficult to get an intuitive feeling for how the flu spreads - but thankfully, the good people at the UK Clinical Virology Network have put together a flash game to help understand the process.  The premise of the game is simple - you play the role of an infected person trying to infect a certain percentage of the poor, unassuming population as quickly as possible.  If you have the time, I recommend reading through the introduction to each of the games (it'll pop up when you start to play).  The authors explain the basics of influenza biology in an entertaining and readable way, and the avoid dumbing down the subject matter. You can find the game here. 

There are a few problems with the game - the transmission model that it uses is very simplistic (essentially, it assumes that if an infected person crosses paths with an uninfected person, the uninfected person will get the flu) and just a bit frightening - it would probably be much harder to catch the flu in the real world.  What I really like about that game is the jump in infections that you can produce by moving an infected student into the school.  This increase in the number of cases would be seen in real life.  Think about it this way - if you are infected with the flu, and have a 10% chance of spreading it to people that you meet, for each individual person the odds are pretty low.  But if you put yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by 100 susceptible people, you're likely to infect about 10 of them.  

I played around with the game for a bit, and my high score for the "Seasonal Pandemic" version was 9.4 days - it would appear that epidemiologic training is good for something... 

On a more serious note, you can find more information about H1N1 at the flu.gov site (link). 

The semester is getting into full swing, and since I like complicating my life I've agreed to blog for the UMich SPH - I'll go ahead and post my introductory blog here as well.  In the future, the content here and the content there will be very similar - I may dork out a bit more on the science on this site, and anything travel-related or unrelated to SPH will stay here, so there's still a reason to check this site.  The UMich SPH blog can be found here - let me know what you think.  Without further ado, here's my first post for UMich SPH.

Hi! My name is David and I'm a first year student in the International Health track in the Department of Epidemiology - it sounds fancy, but just means that I'd like to apply basic epidemiologic concepts and techniques to health problems in developing countries.  I took a roundabout journey to public health.  Ever since reading The Hot Zone (at far too young an age) I've had a bit of a thing for microbiology, and this interest led me to microbial ecology, where I worked with extremophiles (bacteria/archaea that thrive in odd conditions, like boiling acid) during my undergraduate studies.  After completing my undergraduate degree, I worked in a German lab for a year before deciding that I'd like to use my interest in microbiology to improve people's health, and after looking into epidemiology I decided that it was the right program for me. While pursuing my MPH here at UM, I'd like to research the link between infectious disease and chronic disease - there's a lot of exciting work in the field right now, with the recent HPV vaccine as the most publicized example.  HIV/AIDS is another example of this phenomenon - an infectious agent (the HIV virus) causes a chronic condition (AIDS), and the more that researchers look into the field the more connections they find.

There are some amazing opportunities here at the UM SPH, but one of my big concerns is the weather - I've never lived north of the Mason-Dixon line, so it'll be interesting to see how I adjust to this whole "winter" thing.  Although I'm from Tennessee (at least most recently...) I went to Pomona College in Southern California for my undergraduate degree, so I'm looking forward to getting to know the Midwest.

One of the main reasons that I came to UM SPH was their international internship program.  As part of my degree, I'm required to complete an internship performing epidemiological research in a developing country, and right now I'm still very much in the planning stages - but I'll be sharing my thoughts (and frustrations...) as I progress through developing my project and choosing an internship site.  Since I'm also a bit of a science dork, I'll blog about the conferences and seminars hosted at UM SPH and some epidemiology that makes it into the news.

One of the advantages of going to a larger university is the opportunities that the school's connections and size provide.  The School of Public Health at the University of Michigan has great connections with Health Departments all over the state, and they've started a program, called PHAST (Public Health Action Support Team), to help current students get involved with some of these departments.  The original idea was that PHAST would provide students in "crisis situations" - outbreaks and the like - so that the Health Departments would have a free supply of readily available labor to perform tasks that they just couldn't complete.  While it sounds fancy, most of these tasks are pretty basic, like interviewing people who may have eaten a given food item to track the spread of a food-borne outbreak (even though it's almost always the tuna salad...).

While the tasks may be simple, the program is part of the Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness (also located here at UMich), which is funded by the CDC.  As such, the program is integrated into the FEMA disaster response program, requiring all of us with interest in participating in PHAST to complete some basic FEMA training.  The program offers free online training to anyone who's interested, so if you think that you'd like to learn more about Youth Violence or the Effects of Radiological Agents, check out this site. 

Since most of the focus of PHAST is on short-term need, there are only a few deployments (we stole language from FEMA too...) per semester, but the ones that they do offer should be interesting - in the past they've been as diverse as an anthrax preparedness exercise and helping to administer a flu clinic.  Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about the chance to participate in these deployments, and I hope that it will give me some more insight into what it is that public health practitioners actually do.