Juli's time at the CDC

3.21-3.22 I love the CDC (Communicable Disease Center)!! If you were to walk by it and the sign was not there, you would think it was a bunch of giant bungalows or a nursing home on the Florida coast! There are over a dozen small buildings all over the gated campus, which is covered in huge trees, several mango and papaya. But watch out for the grass snakes in the early morning! Only four wards (units) are open at the moment. The rest are negative pressure rooms (when the fan is on it sucks air out of the room, so that when you open the door to go in and out, air from the outside gets sucked in, so that microorganisms like tuberculosis (TB), chickenpox, SARS, and Avian flu (no cases yet!) don't go out into the hall) on the empty wards, that are there in case SARS or Avian flu strike big.
Amy is my preceptor, she is Singaporean, but of Indian descent. The ward I am attached to (placed on) is for palliative cases of HIV/AIDS (which they call members in Singapore because of the stigma), dengue fever (only spread by mosquito), malaria (from people traveling from or just from other countries, Singapore is Malaria free), typhus, measles, mumps, rubella, and fever of unknown origin that gets investigate. It is a 38 bed unit, current running in the low teens for capacity. The staff is wonderful and the patients are so sick!

The first day we toured around the whole campus. They have a clinic for HIV or infectious disease exposed patients. There is a Patient Care Center (PCC) where healthy HIV patients comes during the day to socialize and cook for the HIV/AIDS patients on the wards. Ward 76 has acute and newly diagnosed HIV patients. Ward 75 has TB patients. Ward 72 has all sorts of infectious disease patients, but not TB.

There are Nurse Clinicians (Clinical Nurse Specialist equivalents) that are specialized in infectious disease and wound care that are just wonderful!! I will be doing patient care on all the wards and doing home visits one day, going to the other CDC (CDC2) and can't wait! I will also have to do a presentation on comparing and contrasting HIV/AIDS care in the Singapore and the US.

It is so different! I will bring my camera one of these days and take some pictures for y'all!