ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
OUTBREAK INSIDER Pandemic gives steady-at-the-helm public health leader Christine Bean ’82, ’03G her biggest test yet When Christine Kenney Bean was an undergraduate at UNH, she considered majors and careers that included accounting and journalism. But she enjoyed her twosemester internship in clinical laboratory science training at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center so much that she chose to pursue laboratory science as her career. Accounting’s and journalism’s loss proved to be the state of New Hampshire’s public health gain. From her position as laboratory director at the New Hampshire Public Health Laboratories, Bean and her staff serve as the hub of the state’s COVID-19 response team, coordinating the laboratory surveillance and testing of new outbreaks of the pandemic. “Most people don’t know that state labs are actually a part of the Centers for Disease Control and receive federal funding to apply CDC protocols at the state level,” says Bean, part of whose job entails keeping the federal grants flowing in from Washington.
A typical project might involve testing 5,000 mosquitoes a summer for the presence of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) or West Nile viruses. “The outcome of finding positive mosquito batches in the city of Manchester might be to recommend that the community cancels Little League games for a day or two,” Bean explains. In another widely reported case, Bean’s lab tested 6,000 people in order to trace a hospital outbreak of hepatitis C back to its origin in a single shared needle used by an infected staffer at a New Hampshire hospital.
Unlike hospital labs that do diagnostic testing on individuals, Bean’s lab conducts surveillance on population health.
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