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My Flirtation With Medical Entomology and the Fall of the CDC [1]
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Date: 2025-09-07
A number of years ago I stepped into a lecture hall at the University of Arizona to hear the first lecture in a course on Parasitology, little knowing the the course would encompass the whole of tropical medicine. Our textbook was Hunter, Frye and Swartzwelder, A Manual of Tropical Medicine. I included this information in an earlier diary (www.dailykos.com/...), but that diary was written 11 years ago and so I thought that I’d bring it up to date a bit and add some information that I did not mention in my earlier essay, because of the current crisis at the CDC..
Much later at the time that I went to Vero Beach as part of a field trip for a course taught by Dr. Don Hall on Mosquitoes at the University of Florida I was starting to worry about my chances for a job in my area. Medical Entomology seemed like a good alternate choice, but, as I noted in my earlier essay, the members of the staff at Vero Beach were not encouraging. Still I kept it in the back of my mind for future reference. At one point an individual advised me to get ahead by getting on a review panel to steal good ideas! I was alone with this individual at the time (I’ve forgotten his name), a lowly grad student, and it would have been my word against his, but it shocked me and lowered my opinion of some researchers who were obviously more interested in getting ahead than of doing the work. Thus my dislike of careerists as opposed to professionals. I’ve run into a few more like this in my tenure and they never fail to be stumbling blocks to honest researchers, especially if they get into a position of power. One of these cost me a part in a successful grant in medical entomology (mosquito vectors of West Nile Virus) years later. I wrote the grant with another researcher (who in truth did most of the writing) and I had to vacate it after I was told that I had no right to be on the grant! My nemesis was a professor who thought that he owned medical entomology, but could not tell one mosquito from another! My co-investigator had asked me to be on the grant because I did know how to identify mosquitoes! To top it all off I had asked my co-investigator to include my nemesis on the grant!
Playa lake near Road Forks, New Mexico. A very fruitful local for hordes of mosquitoes!
I thus learned the hard way of how cutthroat medical research could be (it is not always this bad, but there’s always a few bad actors) and solaced myself by concentrating on a less competitive area that I wanted to pursue anyway, namely spiders, their ethology, evolution and taxonomy, as well as my paid speciality in biological control. However, I still retain an interest in epidemiology, especially of arthropod borne diseases and I did give a seminar at a medical entomology conference- on the venomous Widow and Violin Spiders!
Now, of course, the CDC and NIH have been gutted and will likely be directed by amateurs at best, and malignant ignoramuses at worst. If we had troubles with some careerists back in my day, it appears that this type and worst- political ideologies- will be placed in charge. It is a sad commentary on science, and medical research in particular, when such poster people for Dunning-Kruger are in charge of anything, let alone the nation’s health.
What can we lose in this mess?
Up to date vaccines.
New vaccines.
Detection of incursions by such old but still viable diseases like Dengue, Malaria, Yellow Fever, Plague, Hantavirus, Anthrax, Ebola, Marburg Virus, Rabies, Encephalitis, West Nile Virus, Chikungunya, COVID 19, and many others.
Detection of new diseases caused by noval viruses, bacteria and fungi.
Knowledge of vectors of noval arthropod borne diseases.
Respect in the international medical community.
Thousands to millions of lives.
Millions of dollars.
So not much to lose? At least that seemed to be what T***p voters apparently thought.
As a scientist, who has at least an inkling of understanding of the problems involved, I have never been so disgusted and angry in my life.
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