Project Typhus

I have dedicated a ton of time to this project. Over the past seven months, a team (consisting of me, Matt, Jimmy, Dylan, Haron, Patrick, Christie and sometimes Dustin)has spent (and in some cases, wasted) countless Saturday mornings out in the fields, residential areas, beaches, and golf courses of Kihei and Wailea, Maui.

This was all because of a murine typhus epidemic that struck the area several months ago. Murine typhus spread by an organism is neither a bacteria nor a virus. It is a rickettsia (I had to research this stuff). The disease is spread by fleas, and carried by mice. Because of an unusually wet winter, the grass was flourishing in sunny Kihei and Wailea. As a result, the mouse population was booming, and for some reason typhus cases were popping up everywhere.

Trapping of mice in previous years had been pretty inefficient. Because the mouse migration pattern was not known, trapping and poisoning was not as effective as it should be. Our team would try to establish a migration pattern.

We had to make trapping representative of the area, and blind to the terrain. In order to do this, we used Global Positioning Satellite software to plot a 1000-foot line and a 1-2 mile line in each Kihei and Wailea; four lines in all. We then planned our project, got permission from everyone who had land along these lines, including owners of ranches, churches, golf courses, and communities. We got to work.

The mayor of Maui bought our project 96 traps, so there were 24 traps per line, and we measured distances by hand on the short lines: traps were 40' apart, because this is the domain of a non-migrating mouse. On the long lines, we simply spaced the 24 traps out so that they were equidistant from the traps on either side of them. In addition to plotting the trap points by GPS, we tagged the sites with fluorescent tape, and labeled each one.

The school year is coming to a close, but EAST will turn over our trap line data, power points, videos, and other resources to the Maui County Department of Health. Matt and I will continue to facilitate the project. For more information on Typhus, see Haron's gorgeous Project Typhus website at ProjectTyphus.

Jimmy's cool.

This project better be worth it! The document is one of many forms of a basically generic, but reworded letter that we circulated throughout the community.

This is us. Well, three of us.