Yesterday we had a tour of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) and the serum repository. The serum repository is the largest one in the world, containing almost 60 million blood samples, the blood that's left over every time the DoD draws blood for a routine HIV test. So three of those samples in the repository are from me.
They have all sorts of fun toys in there, to make dealing with that many blood samples manageable, including one that pipettes blood into vials and unscrews tube tops. Here's a video, if you want to watch how it works:
And in case you can't visualize 60 million blood samples, here's the view in one of 7 freezers (at -30 degrees C), each of which is about 7000 square feet.
And down the aisle:
After the tour of the serum repository, we had a three hour epidemiology review, which was all sorts of fun (not really). That's what we were doing when the earthquake happened. Unfortunately, it only rescued us from about two minutes of reviewing (enough time to leave the conference room, confirm that the world wasn't coming to an end, and return). Here's what the white board looked like at one point:
I start at AFHSC full-time on Monday (hopefully without the epidemiology reviews). While there, I'll do a surveillance project on a disease of military interest. My surgeon friends tell me that they're seeing a lot of war-wounded patients with invasive fungal infections of the wounds, and for some reason, the patients at Walter Reed do worse than the patients at Bethesda, even though Bethesda gets more patients with this type of infection. I'm hoping to do an analysis of how patients do based on which service (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force) and where in Afghanistan the patients were when wounded. We'll see if that's deemed a good project or not.
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