Medical Entomology for Disease Control
is all about understanding the biology
and behavior
of insects that can transmit pathogens that
cause disease
like malaria or dengue fever. It's
also about understanding
the practical elements of this as well,
in terms of Disease Control
on a global scale. One of the things that
makes this course unique
is the fact that within the London
School we have
a whole lot of experts, world leading
experts in medical entomology
and where we don't have the in-house expertise, we bring in guest lecturers from
overseas and tropical countries
or from other universities within the UK
to teach the students about medical
entomology
on the cutting edge of research. By the end of the course the students will have
learned all the theory behind
biology and control of vectors of disease. But as well as that, we think it's really
important that they get their hands
dirty they get involved in the practical
aspects
and there are a lot of laboratory practicals here at the School as part of
the course where we bring live
specimens and they get to
play around with with live insects. 
But we also send them on field courses so
we have one
week-long residential field course in the
UK and their summer project as well
where they have to design
a project, carry it out themselves and they
analyze the data. 
And that's really important for putting
you in good stead as a scientist.
Major feature of the course was the
field trip that we go to
where everyone on your course goes
together and
do sort of practice runs
of trapping different insects and
surveys we did
a lot of different techniques that
you do use out in the field.
One of the things I'm always really quite surprised
about me please about, very pleased about with this course is
the sense of community between the
students and the staff.
And I think it's really quite unique that at the end
of the course
now only have you built up a broad range
of contacts with fellow students but
also with members of staff here
and staff at other institutes as well,
so you have a broad range of contacts
which can open up so many doors for for
this area.
The teaching was actually really good.
Having experts
come in from the field, I thought that
was really amazing. Some days you would
have
lectures who actually flying in from
Burkina Faso and
coming to talk and they were having
to fly back the next day because they
were
in the middle of the trial that they
were running and that
felt like I was actually getting the
real advice and the
real instruction from the people who
were doing the work that we were wanting to learn about
This course is really designed for anybody that's got a
biological background or biological
interest because what we're doing is
trying to understand biological systems
that surround
vectors of disease essentially. But
it's also for people who are
on the ground working in operational
control programs for example in tropical
countries
who need a bit of specialist skills to
to allow them to develop their control
programs much better.
There's a variety of things that people can go on and do. For example some of our graduates
go on to work for organizations such
as the CDC or
the WHO. Others go out into the field
and
get to work in operational control
programs and some other students which
is very nice for us
stay here at the School and continue their
academic career through doing a PhD in
one of the labs here
or continuing as research assistants
here at the School.
The things
that I gained from the course was the
confidence to be able to
look at a trial that you might be
doing with
disease intervention and to know that I
can try to
attack the problem or
approach the problem with the
information needed.
The beauty of this course is that it's incredibly diverse so whether you're
interested in the sort of intricacies of
biological systems in insects
and the diseases that they transmit or
you're interested
in global problems like malaria and dengue fever,
this course is going to provide you with
the skills and the knowledge that are
essential
if you want to make a real impact, make a
real difference.
