Students find employment seeking deadly disease

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By USF

September 20, 2009

While we spent the summer and entered the fall abuzz over the potential for H1N1 virus, or the ‘Swine Flu,’ to sweep the nation, some University of South Florida students and one high school student found employment that put them in search of mosquitoes carrying a rarer but deadlier virus, Eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE.

“Eastern equine encephalitis is rare, but when humans get the disease the fatality rate is 50 to 70 percent,” says Thomas Unnasch, PhD, a professor in the USF Department of Global Health, College of Public Health. “It is nearly 100 percent fatal for horses. The ecology of EEE in the Southeastern United States is not well understood.”

Dr. Unnasch, who has had ongoing funding from the National Institutes of Health to study the ecology and transmission of EEE and several other diseases, received additional funding under the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” which allocated $21 million nationally over two years for educational supplements to existing research programs. The stimulus funding has provided extended summer employment for more than 3,000 undergraduates and high school students nation-wide.

With his supplemental grant, Dr. Unnasch was able to hire six USF undergraduates and one high school student to take an active role in tracking down which of the 60-plus varieties of mosquitoes in the Tampa Bay area carry EEE. In addition, his collaborators at Auburn University were also able to hire student summer researchers.

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