Busy month for me! Sorry I haven't been posting as much as I'd like, but things have really picked up at the lab and I've had more paperwork than I can handle. There's been a nasty virus affecting the population of white-tailed deer in the Midwest, and I've been working on figuring out a way to help control the spread of this encephalitis-causing pathogen. It's not contagious to humans, but it is contagious to livestock, and as you can imagine it's been quite the workload just dealing with testing all the samples from sick cows all over the US!
Aside from the work with that, however (which has been going much better than expected and is being handled by my lab techs expertly), I've also got another announcement to make, and it's with excitement and a little regret that I say these next words. I won't be able to update and answer your questions for a while.
The reason for this is that I've been called out to the West Coast Branch of the CDC for several months to do some research into what is believed to be a new drug-resistant MRSA strain that has recently been discovered in California. They have had a fairly severe outbreak of infections in immunocompromised individuals in the hospitals there, and they'd like me to take a look at their findings because they are short-staffed (pun not intended). Because of the large amount of work I'll be doing, I won't have much time to post on this blog. In fact, it might be several months or more before I get back to posting here. I'm sorry for the disappointment, but I'll be sure to get back to posting here as soon as I can, at least to give an update on how the project is going.
