Hey all, I was wondering what was your first outbreak/Humanitarian emergency response or perhaps your first significant analysis?
The first time you were working on something that surprised you or you felt that rush of excitement to be helping or discovering things that no else knows.
If like many of us the first one is a blur then just pick your favourite. Ideas and fun over precision. I look forward to hearing your stories.
My first was proper analysis was my MSc thesis where I looked at heart disease and although the intervention worked at 5 years, by 10 years there was no effect because. pretty much. 10 years is a long time and people tend to die over that time period!
My first big response was Mozambique in 2019, Cyclone Idai. We used helicopters to assess the damage over a massive area over 6 days, it was wild to go from a PhD academic setting to having to live code without any internet pretty much on an airport runway for most of the hours of the day. I was analysing things to determine where pilots would go to deliver aid, figure out who was most affected and who could help them.
My first big outbreak was probably Ebola in 2019 in DRC, I’d done other stuff before and some meaningful stuff like I was the person who did the analysis to help MSF figure out how many people had died in the attacks in Myanmar. TBH Ebola in DRC wasn’t that interesting, we did a bunch of routine reports that probably weren’t really needed. I’d say it wasn’t until I was at the UK government and doing lower level Epi, that stuff got interesting. My first task was to figure out whether people were getting reinfected with Covid and if so how big of a problem was it, the answer was yes, and big enough to be a problem. @paulablomquist and I were also heavily involved in figuring out that a lab had not been giving the right results, something we can tell you about in person and not over a public forum.
Look forward to hearing what you all say!
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Wow, I can’t imagine how intense the Mozambique response must have been. I’ve never had such field experience (I hope to someday).
The first thing that popped into my mind was the time I investigated a series of child deaths during the early stages of COVID-19 pandemic. I was working at the Epidemiological Surveillance Center, in the Respiratory Transmission Diseases Division, for the State of São Paulo. The pandemic was hitting hard, loads of work and still so many uncertainties.
We noticed that some unusual child deaths were being reported as having COVID-19 as the cause. After doing some research, we came across a paper with a proposition case definition for something called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) associated with COVID-19 infections.
To my surprise, when I built a case definition script (using the case_when approach we all love) to test these unusual deaths, most of them met the criteria.
This completely changed our approach, and we began seriously monitoring MIS-C cases.
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Oh, fun topic!
My first humanitarian response was in DRC in 2019. I was there for 9 months but the very first project I worked on was coordinating a measles vaccination coverage survey in the jungle. The vaccination team had just finished the campaign and were so confident that they had vaccinated all the kids and then some (administrative coverage rate was 104%!).
It was eye-opening and incredibly rewarding to work in this area of the world and see the difference a vaccine can make. We had village leaders, parents and clinic staff come up to our survey teams, thanking us for bringing the vaccines and telling us that since the campaign, none of the children in their village had died. People would run back to their homes when they heard we were coming in hopes that they would be randomly selected to participate in the survey as a way of saying thank you.
This was, however, one of the hardest things I had ever done. Coordinating the training, logistics, security and survey planning was intense! Once data collection was complete, I was then pulling my hair out trying to learn R for the first time with very little internet. The packages took forever to download and I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t have done it without @alenglet (an incredible MSF advisor) and the first markdown templates from @aspina who was supporting the R4EPIs project at the time. In the end, we determined that the overall measles vaccination coverage rate was acceptable and we saw a huge decrease of cases in that area.
Since then, I’ve had the chance to coordinate other surveys in other countries and it’s one of my favourite things to do as an epi.
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