A Bug’s Life: Ticks & Mosquitoes

…and the scientists who love them.

Well hi, I’m Liz Dykstra and I’m the Public Health Entomologist here at the State Health Department. I’m also the lead for our mosquito and tick surveillance projects. So, for mosquitoes we do surveillance for West Nile virus as well as St. Louis encephalitis and western equine encephalitis. And we also do surveillance for ticks and we’re looking for various tick pathogens such as the pathogen that causes lyme disease as well as several other pathogens that cause human disease.

We also work a lot with partners that we work with for mosquito surveillance and we also have a number of partners that help us collect ticks.

Hi, I’m Amy Salamone, I’m the Molecular Analyst for the zoonotic disease department. I do the pathogen testing on ticks and mosquitoes.

[on screen text] Favorite part of your job? Or is that a difficult question…

Oh no, the part of my job that I love the most is getting to learn the ecology of these pathogens in Washington. I find it very interesting as far as the locations where we find the pathogens and just being able to do some outreach and let people know where they could be at risk.

I would say that’s the same for me I love finding out where these ticks and mosquitoes are most common and especially the different species of ticks and mosquitoes, where you’re going to find them what kind of habitat they are in. So it’s just a lot of fun to go out into the field. So I think that’s probably one of my favorite parts about the job and then just interesting you never know what’s going to come across your desk.

[on screen text] Any hidden talents?

Hidden talent, I’m not bad at creative writing. And I just started doing a little bit of poetry so that’s a developing hidden talent.

Something that people seem mildly surprised about when they learn this about me is that I like to use, I like to do woodworking and I like to have projects around the house and I like to use a bunch of power tools and people always seem to think that that’s very funny.

[on screen text] Your ONE food on a deserted island.

I would want to have, I’m going to get specific, Halo Top ice cream, the chocolate chip cookie dough flavor because it’s delicious and it has protein.

I really like dark chocolate with almonds so have a little bit of nutrition.

Yeah.

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