The Disease Detectives: Unraveling How Viruses Go Viral

The University of Florida has an ambitious goal:: to harness the power of its faculty, staff, students, and alumni to solve some of society’s most pressing problems and to become a resource for the state of Florida, the nation, and the world. The experts at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) make it their mission answering baffling questions such as how is a pig-borne disease transmitted in a Muslim country, what kinds of parasites do Florida ticks carry and how has a cholera strain from Nepal evolved in Haiti?   The Disease Detectives takes you inside the EPI, a center of high-tech labs and high-speed computers where more than 200 investigators, including geographers, pediatricians, epidemiologists, and even ecologists, join forces to study and combat pathogens that cause diseases in plants, animals, and humans—from salmonella in tomatoes to African swine fever to HIV/AIDS. The stories chronicled in GATORBYTES span all colleges and units across the UF campus. They detail the far-reaching impact of UF’s research, technologies, and innovations—and the UF faculty members dedicated to them. Gatorbytes describe how UF is continuing to build on its strengths and extend the reach of its efforts so that it can help even more people in even more places.