Well, what we saw under the scope,
we saw that parasite egg. Those are microscopic. But
then, they grow into-these-Pseudomonas, for example.
No, it's an ascaris. That mucoid, that capsule
is what gets inside you, and if it gets into
your lungs, it's hard to treat. And again, this
will actually be in your gut, feed off the blood
in your gut. It's a type of parasite.
So it can be spread easily person-to-person.
Um, tapeworms. I have, unfortunately, I don't think
we have - do we have any tapeworms?
In the seventh grade, when
the first time my teacher said the word deoxyribonucleic acid
- believe it or not - that just lit a spark under me.
My name is David Rockabrand.
I am a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy,
and I am a microbiologist.
It's a beautiful day but a little noisy.
The ship's getting ready to deploy.
In many ways, the Navy offers a situation
that you don't normally see in the civilian world.
If you want to experience and learn about infectious diseases,
you have to go where they are.
The idea of a, you know, house call is old,
but in the Navy, it very much is,
you go out into the field,
and you take care of folks.
The Mercy is basically a, a floating hospital.
It has 1000-bed capacity. The lab is
12 operating rooms. The laboratory is first-rate.
"Specifically, what we're looking at here"
"is a gram stain, this lets you know-"
They have um, basically every media, every material
that you could ever want in a microbiology lab,
or in a hospital for that matter, on that ship.
The Navy does a lot of humanitarian work.
Not just the big hospital ships, the Mercy and the
Comfort, but also the Peleliu and some of the other
amphibious ships go out on a lot of, on a
lot of humanitarian missions. We have labs in Indonesia,
in Cairo, in Peru. And we actually
set up a clinic there to look at the diseases.
To be able to figure out what they have.
To collect samples. To find out what
they have and how you treat it.
And they look to us.
When you show up in a village, and you say,
'I'm from the U.S. Navy. I'm from the government.'
They look to the Western medicine as a real gold
standard. So they look at you immediately and like,
'Okay, you must know what you're talking about.'
So it really has been a real blessing to serve
both our Active Duty, our retirees, their dependents and people
around the world. That's one of the things I really enjoy
about my job. It's real. It's relevant.
This isn't, sort of, pie-in-the-sky academia.
This is real world. When you realize that religion, politics
doesn't matter anymore; it's really what you can do
and what you're doing to help people.
And they see that. They look at that.
They respect that.