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Imagine you're a researcher working outdoors in a New Orleans summer. It's 100 degrees, and you're going door-to-door in neighborhoods where people have grown tired of being studied by outsiders in the decade since Hurricane Katrina. And in the best-case scenario--on a very good day--you wind up handling a bunch of disease-carrying rats.
That's what Tulane University molecular ecologist Michael Blum and his research team do and have done for six months in each of the last three years. The work may sound unpleasant, but Blum says it's laying the groundwork for a potentially powerful tool in disaster relief: a mathematical model that could simulate how environmental changes, natural or man-made, affect populations of rodents that carry pathogens hazardous to human health.Image credit: Center for Bioenvironmental Research, Tulane University
