Public Health Institute - Week One Review

Food Safety Risk Assessment:
This class was definately worth taking, and got me thinking a lot about all of the steps that our food goes through between where it begins and when it ends up in my tummy. We downloaded two programs as a part of the class, Analytica and @risk plugin for MS Excel. Sadly, due to poor planning on the part of the professors, the software wasn't really working until the third (out of four) day of class. We (my group) spent the 4 hour class creating a Risk Assessment using @risk for Campylobacter jejuni in broiler chicken in the United States using data from 2003. It was pretty awesome to see how the software worked once we finally got going. Sadly, we really only know how to use one function (Triangular Estimation) in @risk and none in Analytica. I see how they could both be really cool and useful too. We presented on Friday and and felt that we'd done very well.
I think everyone in the class felt really confused and like we hadn't learned anything until we got to the presentations on Friday. That's the point that we realized that we were able to stand in front of a 30 person class and describe a risk assessment plan without looking like a complete idiot!

Antimicrobial Resistance:
This class was awesome. Dr. Singer, aka "what did you just call me? my name is RANDY!", is a really awesome professor. Also, on the first day of a four day class he changed the grading policy! From an 8 page paper and a presentation on Friday to a 5 page paper only. It's a review paper on anything we want that relates to Antimicrobial Resistance, minimum 10 resources. I'm actually a tiny bit excited about writing it.
Cool topics we learned about: mechanisms of resistance, transmission of resistance, selection for resistance, cycling of antimicrobials, multi-drug therapy. Lots of group discussions and a ton o' fun. Met lots of cool people too :-D I'm having a really tough time making some of the connections that I know I need to make because I'm so caught up in what's going on right now, rather than the fact that I still need 115 hours of Public Health Field Experience and a Master's Project before I'm done. Goal for next summer: accomplish those things.

Global Food Systems: Dairy:
Really fun, mostly because I knew a lot of people on the trip and I made a couple of new friends. We went to a large-scale dairy farm (milking 2500 head), a small scale organic dairy farm (milks ~60 head I think), saw a couple of milk tank trucks, a dairy processing facility (Schroeders), got a talk from International Dairy Queen and another from Schwans. Overall, it was a good experience, though I'm still not sure where I stand on Organic farming. It's a good concept, I think, but in practice it looks very - rough? - to me.
Random fact: Schroeders manufactures everything Kosher by default (the rabbi was there when we were touring), and do a ton of stuff that we love. Support them! They make Rice Dream and the Soy Milk that we know and love. They are making that new line of Pomagranite juice (in 9 flavors) that looks tasty. Also, the plant is amazing, they treat their employees very well. They do a ton of allergen testing between lines. They do a ton of tests on the product to ensure safety. They are everything that you could want out of a plant that processes your liquids!