It’s amazing what veterinary grad students have to go through, not to mention veterinarians in academia and a clinical setting. What are your thoughts about visiting state parks and wildlife refuges to collect ticks in order to do research on Lyme Disease?
I don’t know that they liked it per se, but two students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Veterinary Medicine did just that. The worst part of it, however, was when one of the students found a rather large tick stuck up in her belly button and she couldn’t get it out. She burned it, and then tried to pull it out with tweezers, but only pieces of it would come out. She had to leave a part of it in and periodically check for infection.
The organizer of the project would go out with students to a designated park and into the woods— complete with brambles, thorns, spider webs and mud— having to drag thick woven sheets behind them designed to catch ticks and crawling insects. Every 10 meters or so, they would stop and pick the ticks off the sheet and drop them into vials of ethanol. I can only imagine what it would be like to look down and think you have black dust on your legs but then realize that it’s hundreds of baby ticks!
Here are some other dirty jobs worth noting:
- Students were instructed to create “ideal” environments for mosquitoes that can harbor the West Nile virus from designated hot-spots around the suburbs of Chicago.
- Several students went to Uganda to trap rats, looking for disease. Others collected monkey “samples.”
- Second-year students studying parasitology were told to bring in fecal matter from their Pets to be analyzed in class. Students who didn’t have Pets had to go look for it elsewhere (one students had to ask a stranger for his Pet waste).
- How about chopping up rats for the raptors.
- Faculty studied the cross contamination of cat feces mixed with swine feed in habitats (which can transfer a parasite that causes toxoplasmosis).
It’s all for a good purpose, though. I agree with the college of veterinary medicine in that, “Without these scientists and their students and student workers, valuable data and research is never collected. These people save the lives of animals and humans, keeping our environment and health safer and sounder!”
Tell us what some of your messiest encounters have been like.