UF students are first in Veterinary Scholars Program to conduct field work abroad
By Sarah Carey
Like many second-year veterinary students at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine and elsewhere, Danae Witte and Nicole Perry don’t know exactly where they’ll end up career-wise when they graduate with their D.V.M. degrees ― in Perry’s case, with an M.P.H. degree as well.
But as the only two veterinary students in the United States who traveled abroad this year as part of the Boehringer Ingelheim Veterinary Scholars Program, they are approaching the future with a unique, shared experience anchored in curiosity and a love for research.
Over 500 veterinary students from around the country participate annually in research programs through their academic institutions and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This year is only the second year that veterinary student scholars have been able to work directly with scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, which investigates diseases that could affect livestock and public health and advances sustainable approaches for agriculture and food production.
Although 13 veterinary students participated in various USDA projects, only UF’s Witte and Perry had the opportunity to travel internationally to do fieldwork in Africa, where they assisted with research and monitoring of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, or CCHF.
Endemic to Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asian countries south of the 50th parallel, the CCHF virus causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever outbreaks with fatality rates approaching 40 percent.
A wide range of wild and domestic animals such as cattle, sheep and goats are hosts to the virus, which is transmitted to humans through contact with infected animal blood or tissues during and immediately after slaughter.
The study the students supported is a collaboration between the USDA, the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the University of California, Davis One Health Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. The goal of the study is to establish protocols and sites for monitoring the spread of CCHF across Central, East and West Africa.
And while both worked with the same primary mentor — Dr. Lisa Hensley, director of the Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit for the USDA’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas — Witte and Perry each spent time in different African countries and delved into separate aspects of CCHF research.
Witte spent the entire two months of her project in Congo. Under the supervision of Dr. Nicole Hoff, country director and an adjunct professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fielding School of Public Health, Witte spent most of her time out in the field, working alongside members of the UCLA Kinshasa-based lab, veterinary professionals from the Laboratoire Vétérinaire de Kinshasa and medical professionals from the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale to collect samples from local farms, markets and slaughterhouses.
Perry, on the other hand, focused on doing more in-lab work at UC Davis, where she spent about six weeks under the supervision of Dr. Brian Bird, a professor of emerging and zoonotic diseases, who led the research group. She then traveled to Tanzania to work with collaborators from the Sokoine University of Agriculture for the final phase her project.
“When I initially arrived into Congo, we were in the final phases of finishing up logistics planning for doing field research,” Witte said. “A lot of what I spent my first two weeks doing was preparing tools to take out to the field.”
She helped code and translate surveys from English to French to be used in data collection, for example, and taught members of the local veterinary lab team how to use REDCap, an electronic data collection software program, on mobile tablets.
“I really enjoyed working with our local research partners in Congo; they’re wonderful, but I realized they have several infrastructural challenges that prevent them from achieving some of the global standards that we strive for in research,” Witte said. “I focused mostly on teaching them how to use the software on the tablets. Basically, it was a way not to have paper sheets that might get damaged or lost. I was worried about preserving the quality of our data and saw an area where we could try something new, so I talked to Dr. Hoff, who agreed to let me pilot the use of REDCap for our data collection system.”
During the latter period of her project, Witte was able to implement the tools she’d help the local lab workers hone.
“I was mostly there for quality control and answering questions about things like work flow and logistics,” she said. “I collected samples from cows when it was needed, but the veterinary team was experienced at sample collection, so I was there more for support. They are well-versed in conducting research, so my goal was to assist with the different aspect that we were introducing to the study.”
Witte also visited a variety of locations within Congo while doing fieldwork, including two slaughterhouses located in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, where she established relationships with the veterinarians at those facilities. She also visited farms and took a flight to Kisangani, a city located within a forest in the interior of the country.
“Congo has many provinces,” Witte said. “Kinshasa is the capital and where a lot of the people are, but when you are testing for the prevalence of disease, they want to localize it by province.”
Her group is approaching the end of animal sampling at this point, she said, adding that it was great experience to see the team go from starting the project to implementing new techniques in the field.
Perry’s day-to-day work in California involved going to the lab, optimizing and finetuning procedures and “making sure we had everything down” in advance of the Tanzania phase of her project.
“What they had done the previous year for our project was sample cows and collect ticks from cows, but these ticks were kept in the freezer until they were ready for sampling. We had a spreadsheet of all of the ticks and we were trying to sort through that, selecting the ticks that we wanted to study,” she said.
Her group was primarily interested in ticks from the genus Hyalomma, which are known as a main transmitter of the disease to livestock animals and to people.
“We had to have everything down, because when we got to Tanzania, we only had two weeks to get everything done,” Perry said.
Once her team arrived in Tanzania, they got right to business.
“When we were there, we’d go to the lab, we’d process the ticks and extract RNA, perform PCR testing and compile our data,” she said. “That was mostly every day, except the weekends; one weekend I got to go on a safari, and that was a lot of fun.”
Both Witte and Perry praised the local teams they worked with in Congo and Tanzania respectively, for making them feel welcome and always providing support, along with their mentors. They also had high praise for the drivers they used in their local communities, although sometimes language barriers impeded their ability to communicate as well as they would have liked.
Both students said their experiences were enriching in many ways, aside from what they learned during their actual research. They also said they always felt well-supported by their local teams and mentors.
“I’d never lived in California, so that was a very new experience for me as well,” Perry said, adding that she had always loved infectious disease research and hoped there might be some way to incorporate such research into a career that allowed her to do research and practice at the same time. Her interest in research and global health inspired her to enroll in the college’s dual D.V.M./M.P.H. program, and she recognizes that additional educational tool will be of value in her future, wherever it leads.
“I made a lot of connections and a lot of friends, and learned a lot,” she added. “Even though it was stressful at times, I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else this summer.”
Although not currently pursuing an M.P.H. degree along with her D.V.M., Witte said a Ph.D. “was not off the table” as far as her future goals. She was pleased to have been asked to continue on with her project and plans to do so…and to work on her French.
“I’ll be going back next summer,” she said. “It will be a little short trip due to rotations, but I’m looking forward to it. We’ll see what happens long- term. Right now, my goal is to stay curious.”
Hensley, the students’ overall project mentor, said in a press release from Boehringer Ingelheim that one of the most enjoyable aspects of her own work has been the chance to do fieldwork.
“Facilitating this opportunity for Danae and Nicole to travel to Africa to experience fieldwork at its most impactful is so rewarding,” she said.
Witte and Perry were among about two dozen University of Florida first-year students who took part in the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Linda F. Hayward Florida Veterinary Scholars Program, as it’s known internally, last summer. They and their fellow FVSP participants all presented the findings of their research during the National Veterinary Scholars Symposium, held in Puerto Rico in early August.