In an article by Peter Hotez, “Stigma: The stealth weapon of NTD,” he discusses the social implications of many NTDs.

For instance, Jorge Alvar and his colleagues at the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently pointed out that women have a higher disease burden from leishmaniasis than men because of reduced health care access, and because of their heightened social isolation from the disfigurement caused by the cutaneous form of the disease, which can prevent a young woman from being permitted to touch her children, enter into marriage, or remain married [3],[9]. Similarly, a team from Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands has eloquently described how the disfiguring wounds of Buruli ulcer in Africa cause affected individuals to attempt to hide their disease because of the belief that it results from witchcraft or the “evil eye,” and as a result such individuals seek neither medical attention nor employment [3],[9].

During my time studying in South Africa, HIV was, and still is, very stigmatized to the point that men and women did not want to get HIV tests. There are also practical reasons for their reluctance to get tested for HIV, since drug access is not yet universal in R.S.A. the positive diagnosis would only tell them that they are going to die. The diagnosis of HIV could help prevent the spread of HIV, but the individual has little incentive to know that they are living with such a highly stigmatized disease.

I just signed up for a mentor on Mentornet. The forum discussion had some very pertinent topics, such as work/life balance and how to make yourself heard in a room of men! I found out about it through AWIS, the Association of Women in Science.
Mentorship is something I really want to start promoting here (on this website), so I’m going to try out this whole mentornet thing, see how it goes and get an idea of what the mentoring process is like. Basically I’ve, under the guise of adding content to this site, been scaning the internet this week and found a wealth of stories of women making it in science. There are the blogs where they tell stories, previous post, or the associations where there are magazine articles writen about it.

Science women, sounds kind of like superwomen - I like it! Just found a great blog at Scienceblogs called, you guessed it, Sciencewomen. So please, go and enjoy. Not that I want to direct anyone away from this site, but I want this site to be more of a resource in blog format and a place for discussion, rather than a reflection on my life - that would get boring quickly!

I was looking for some “cool mosquito” pictures for the header and came across The Mosquito Bag. This is THE bag for the girl in the tropics, or just for the girl missing the tropics, missing sleeping under a mosquito net…umm, so I don’t quite know what the creators were thinking with this one but I love all the colors it comes in.

I really enjoyed the stories of Micella’s journey through grad school and now a post doc. She is in engineering, which is some what different, but her experiences still seem very apropriate.

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/1400/educated_woman_the_grad_school_adventures_of_micella_phoenix_dewhyse_chapter_1_why_am_i_here

This is a fascinating paper I came across, measuring the seropositivity for Flaviviridae, Togaviridae and Bunyaviridae in Cameroon.  It might be that I really want to go back to Africa, but I found the study full of leads for future research.  For example, they discover one village where the % of seropositive adults to DENV-2 is 58%!  What is going on with that?  Shadow of malaria?  Less virulent strains of viruses?  Yellow Fever virus is also very high in these villages, as is Chikungunya virus.

This is one reason I would love to get some researchers in malaria and other diseases as contributors to the site, other wise I will be entirely too virus focused. 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16760524?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

As you can all see, I have been trying to beef-up the website before you got here with a little information.  I haven’t decided what other kind of stuff we want to post, such as news, research, etc.  So that is really up to all of you!

Please contact be for a user account!  I need help coming up with interesting posts about the world of medical entomology. I mean, it is infinitely fascinating, obviously, I just should be doing some work related to my thesis too.  Right?

There are some great investigators as the Wadsworth Center in upstate NY. On the website they published lectures and interviews with the featured lecturers so that you can see real women in medical entomology in action.  Dr. Laura Kramer is talking about WNV and Arbovirus surveillence ans some recent research.

http://www.wadsworth.org/educate/lecture_series/2008/wmp/kramer_wmp.html

And Dr. Kristen Bernard it talking about arbovirus interactions between the vector, virus and vertebrate host!

http://www.wadsworth.org/educate/lecture_series/2008/wmp/bernard_wmp.html

I’m hoping in some future posts to have inteviews with these two women, who have been very encouraging of my own career, and who are very supportive of women (and men) in the sciences!

Another great investigator is Jan Conn, who does research on Anopheles mosquitoes and malaria.

http://www.wadsworth.org/educate/lecture_series/2008/wmp/conn_wmp.html

My favorite science and culture (tag-line “Science as Culture”) has an article on mosquitoes.  Not necessarily anything new to most of us, but a good introduction to one of the craziest psedo-science magazines out there.

The Booming Mosquito Battle

How can we kill, repel or avoid them? Let us count the ways.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/the_booming_battle_against_mos.php?page=2

This is an excellent book (well, I’ve only heard the author talk and haven’t read the book) about barriers and choices that female scientists make through out their careers.  She talks about why women leave science at all different points in their lives and what factors are valuable to keep women in scientific fields.  Some ideas she cites are mentoring and networking, or just community in general within the academic setting as being invaluable for the success of female scientists.