This exciting week was concentrated on working with COPA. My main takeaway from this week was understanding all the community partners that were involved in making these programs run. I started out the week working with the recruitment team. Meaning we would go in the 14 different neighborhood zones and try to enter families in the study. This is tedious work and sometimes not fruitful, however, it is crucial for longitudinal studies. I also continued my normal 12-month COPA participant visits and even got to interview a child. During one of the visits, a next door neighbor had a mosquito trap, having done previous work with these traps last summer I could easily identify it. After a bit of question, I learned a little bit more about PRVCU, or Vector Control Unit. PRVCU is the government program that is involved in putting down these traps. To my surprise, the next day someone from PRVCU came in and did training on how to sample and look for larvae as well as inspecting porches. Turns out PRVCU data on mosquito traps are used in conjunction with the COPA study, making them an incredibly important partner.
