Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Zoonotic infections? Anyone need help with zoonotic infection mitigation?

It seems that I have finally reached a level (professionally) where recruiters have started contacting me (as opposed to my begging them); that is not to say that any jobs have come of it but hey, it does help my (severely damaged) professional ego. Today I got an email asking if they could include me in a proposal (hardly a guarantee of employment) as a "Zoonotic Swine Infections specialist"… didn’t see that one coming. I got my MA in “International development” but was frustrated by the lack of technical expertise the degree offered so every chance I had I tried to gear it towards something more technical (agriculture related in my case). An example of this was my masters paper, which was pretty much zoonotic infection mitigation in small scale Southeast Asian aquaculture production. I have worked on a small scale swine operation in the US as well so some recruiter thought “hey, this guy might work” (I am guessing there are not many people who have a background in this, and having been in the position of having to recruit consultants I know the feeling) but the problem is that reducing zoonotic (mainly parasitic) infections in a swine operation is probably quite different from doing it in an aquaculture operation, not to mention variables like scale (I am much more familiar with small scale livestock production in general)… and the fact that the best mitigation is just cooking your food well before eating it (there are exceptions like mad cow disease but anywho)

No comments: