I spoke to Mary Jensen. She is an epidemiologist in the
South Central Health District of Idaho. After playing a little phone tag, I was
able to talk to her about infectious diseases. She only deals with reportable
infectious diseases, so we talked about that. I found in this assignment that
if you ask for general health issues or trends for an area, people tend to ask
you to be more specific. It was reemphasized to me that public health is a very
broad field.
1-The
first trend Mary Jensen identified was pertussis. There has been an outbreak of
this disease in Idaho. Mary mentioned that this is one of the trickier
reportable infectious diseases that her office deals with. This is mostly
because doctors will sometimes treat it without reporting it. She said that this
makes the prevention and containment of pertussis harder to maintain.
2-The
next thing she mentioned was influenza. Idaho has not seen a lot of influenza
yet, but she expects to see more cases in the coming months. Fortunately, they
are predicting it to be a mild flu season in that area of Idaho. I wonder if a
mild flu season was predicted for the nation, so I check the CDC website, but
they were rather noncommittal. Perhaps the flu is too variable to predict national
trends accurately.
3-The
last thing Ms. Jensen was able to tell me about southern Idaho was the recent cryptosporidiosis
outbreak. This is the disease that is most commonly spread by contaminated
swimming pools. For this particular outbreak, public health officials were not
able to isolate the source. So, it may have been a problem with a swimming pool
or perhaps it was something else. Southern Idaho does a lot with agriculture
and livestock. It wouldn't surprise me if the outbreak started because some
kids went swimming in the wrong irrigation ditch at the wrong time.
Ms.
Jensen couldn’t really come up with any other major concerns southern Idaho has
with reportable infectious disease. She said that overall Idaho is low in
incidence. Stuff like Q-fever she will only see maybe one case a year. This
speaks very well of the communities around there. She was able to tell me
though that Boise, a couple hours west of the South Central Health District,
was having some problems with syphilis and HIV.
4-I was
curious to know what constituted an outbreak of syphilis so I went to the Idaho
Department of Health’s website to get some numbers. As it turns out the Boise
Health District had ten out of the twelve reported cases for early syphilis in
July through September of 2012. Looking back in the quarter one and two
reports, syphilis has been a problem for Boise all year long. In quarter one,
it had the only reported cases of syphilis in Idaho. Looking back further it
appears that the Boise area consistently has had one of the highest incidence
rates of syphilis in Idaho.
5-HIV
is another sexually transmitted disease. In April to June of this year, the
Boise area saw a spike in HIV cases. Eight of the thirteen cases in Idaho were
reported in this district. In the next quarter, the incidence dropped off a bit
with only three cases reported in the health district. But, this was 75% of the
cases reported for Idaho. The Boise area
is one of the most highly populated areas in Idaho. Perhaps this is part of the
reason their STDs rates are so high. This is not to say that urban dwellers are
less moral; it might be that there are just more people in a concentrated area,
so there are more incidents.
-Heather J. Johnson
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