Navy ports

No, I did not actually visit a Navy port. I'm referring to an entirely different kind of port.

After a morning spent learning more about preventive medicine from LTC Cavicchia, we broke for lunch and reconviened in the PM conference room for journal club. I was assigned chapter 8-11 of DA PAM (Department of the Army Pamphlet) 40-11 to present, and when I got to the room with about two minutes to spare before 1300, I was told that the computer didn't have internet access, and it being a government computer, I couldn't use my unencrypted thumb drive (doing so would scramble the drive and make it useless), so I had to borrow one from a resident, run down to the library (conference room is on the third floor, library is on the first--and on the opposite end of the building), get to my email, and get the powerpoint onto the thumb drive before walking briskly back to the conference room. When I arrived, the computer screen was blank. Apparently, this government computer wasn't encrypted, so when one of the residents tried to download his presentation from his encrypted drive, he ended up crashing the computer and his (likely expensive) government-issued encrypted thumb drive. So we got a new computer, which had internet access, but when LTC Cersovsky tried accessing the network, nothing happened. By the way, it's now 1330, and then there's a fire drill. So it's 1400 by the time we get back into the conference room and LTC Cersovsky calls the help desk. They arrive, he explains the problem, that we can't get onto the network, and they look at it and say, "Oh, that's a Navy port." You see, WRAIR is not just WRAIR--it's also NMRC (Navy Medical Research Center). And apparently, the Navy and Army networks don't get along, and you can only access the Army network from an Army port, and the Navy network from a Navy port. Needless to say, the presentations on DA PAM 40-11 didn't happen today, and "Navy port" is the new joke of WRAIR preventive medicine.

Tomorrow, CPT Lee and I are going to AFHSC (Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center) to try to figure out the background rates the condition that we're investigating. After all, if ten soldiers a month end up hospitalized for this, than what we're seeing is hardly an outbreak, and that will be that. LTC Cersovsky is pretty sure that's not the case.

By the way, here's WRAIR.