USAMRIID and the CDC

(AKA: The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention)

Before I enrolled at the Ai I had considered joining the Navy. I felt that it would be good for me to travel, to learn perseverance and discipline, and there were some financial benefits. I thought about it pretty seriously but eventually decided to go for my art degree first, and decide on that later.
Well since I've gotten to the Ai I've become interested in the medical field. Specifically infectious diseases and biomedical research. I realize from where I'm at it would be extremely difficult to get a medical degree at this point. I am already in debt from my art degree and the amount of schooling would be ridiculous. Plus, how would I be able to pay off debt from medical school if I don't plan on working in the medical field in the US? The money just isn't there.
But then recently I've learned about the Army's medical research facility in Maryland. They basically do exactly what I want to do: virushunting, biomedical research, developing new vaccines, and attacking hot agents on all fronts. Because they are an Army facility, they have tons of funding, and they have sole access to some of the most dangerous viruses in the world. In short, USAMRIID is the best place for a microbial researcher to be.
This opens up a whole new set of possibilities. If I signed up for the Army with the intention of being stationed at USAMRIID, I could get my medical schooling partially paid for. And job security, with the possibility of ending up in the very place I want to be. Even if I didn't get stationed at USAMRIID, there would be plenty of other research facilities to work at. And if I did get to work there, I'd be set.
The researchers at USAMRIID also get to work closely with the CDC and WHO (The World Health Organization).

I don't know if this is something I am going to do, but it definitely sounds like a good opportunity to look into, especially if I want to pursue a medical degree. The downside is that it could be years before I have the freedom to travel the way I want to and do documentaries. In my mind I see these fields overlapping quite a bit, and the potential there is exciting.

For now I'm just looking into different possibilities. I have a couple of years before I can really pursue anything anyway.

Monkeys and Marburg: Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire

I'm currently reading Richard Preston's The Hot Zone. It covers outbreaks of the Ebola virus and it's sister virus, Marburg, both of which can be retraced to Eastern African monkeys.
Here is a crazy fact I have learned recently: many threatening infectious diseases have originated in African monkeys over the past few decades. Since humans and monkeys are both primates, monkeys cannot be passive carriers for a disease that affects humans. In other words, the same diseases that kill humans will kill monkeys, too. They exhibit the same or similar symptoms and respond to the same medical treatments, which is why they are often used for medical research. But what this also means is that diseases like Ebola, Marburg and HIV can be transmitted from monkeys to humans fairly easy, in the same ways they would be transmitted from human to human or monkey to monkey.
Because they are perfect for research and because they are not native inhabitants of Europe/North America, researchers have been shipping monkeys from many parts of Africa (specifically Uganda) for decades. In fact, monkeys are the main export/trade currency for Uganda. They are caught in the wild, inspected and caged, and sent to various research facilities around the world.
During the inspection process, from time to time they would find sick monkeys. These sick monkeys, instead of being killed, were sent to an island in the middle of Lake Victoria and re-released. The island was overrun with every form of plague, and was constantly being restocked with sick monkeys. It became a breeding ground for hot agents (infectious bacteria or viruses with a Level 4 biohazard-- the highest possible. HIV is a level 2 biohazard if that gives you a clue how serious this is).
Sometimes, if they were light on a shipment and needed more monkeys, the inspector would sneak in a monkey from the hot island. Soon, the monkeys were aboard a shipment headed to various parts of the world. In such close contact with so many other monkeys, disease spread fast, and jumped from monkeys to human hosts when they came in contact.
This is how Marburg virus started (a less virulent strain of the Ebola virus, but one that still kills 1/4 of the people it attacks in less than a two-week span), both forms of Ebola, and also HIV.
Villages that border Lake Victoria were among the hardest hit by these viruses and one of the first places in the world that HIV was detected.

In the book that I am reading right now, Richard Preston gives a pretty clear example of what Marburg does to the human body, and it is MESSED UP:
"He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows: his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like the slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist."
-The Hot Zone, p.12-13

Anyway, I just thought I would share. I don't know about level 4 hot agents, but some kind of biomedical research may be in my future... plus if you take the time to really think through how to virus started and spread to humans... well, I don't want to get into that too much for right now, but it is a interesting train of thought.