Public Health: Future Careers Discussion

What is one thing that you’ve learned about Public Health that may be useful in your future healthcare careers?

It is Friday afternoon. You are so excited for your weekend to start. Unfortunately, your phone rings, and you are dreading answering the call. For some reason, outbreaks seem to always happen on Fridays! When you answer the phone, it is the Chamber of Commerce. They are calling public health to report that 300 of their 550 employees are sick after attending a banquet. You call your good acquaintance in the laboratory at the local hospital. She tells you she meant to call you that morning and got sidetracked, but that they had been seeing a good number of positive cultures for norwalk virus coming through there in the past 24 hours. You know this virus causes gastrointestinal symptoms (vomiting, diarrhea, etc). You also notice you have sticky notes on your computer for you to return phone calls to Second Baptist Church and the Boys and Girls Club. The notes say they have people sick as well. Man. So much for your weekend!

The who, what, when, why, and how are very important in an investigation. You want to be consistent in asking the right questions to get all of the information you need from these sources. With this limited information, what more do you need to know? Tell me some of the questions you would ask as you try and get to the bottom of this outbreak.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument. Get homework help here