From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 15:05:10 EST
January 16, 2003 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Among the many scholarships earned this year by Calvin College students, one of
the most unusual belongs to first-year student Sara Ladenburger of Midland,
Michigan.
The biology major was recently given the seventh annual Michigan Mosquito
Control Association (MMCA) academic scholarship, a $1,000 award.
Ladenburger's scholarship is jointly funded by MMCA and Bill Hatfield of
Hatfield Spraying Service of Nunica, Michigan.
A graduate of Midland High School, Ladenburger says the award may sound funny,
but getting it involved a fair bit of work. In fact among the criteria this
year was the submission of a six-page essay on "Mosquitoes and Disease: Is There
a Reemerging Problem."
Ladenburger's essay ran nine pages (plus three pages of bibliography). And in
it she outlined both the history of mosquito-borne diseases and the current
issues. She led with the problems mosquito-borne malaria and yellow fever added
to the construction of the Panama Canal where 22,000 workers died in a six-year
span before an American doctor, William Gorgas, instituted measures to eliminate
mosquitoes from the canal area.
She then sketched the reemergence of malaria as a significant worldwide problem
(there was a quadrupling of malaria worldwide in the 1990s) as well as the
impact of dengue fever, a viral disease. And she concluded with a look at last
summer's outbreak of West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes and never present in
Michigan prior to 2002.
Nature has long been a passion of Ladenburger. She's participated in nine
straight Christmas bird counts for the National Audubon Society. She also
illustrated the cover of a book on the natural history of Mecosta County.
"I am very interested in nature and the parts of biology that are more
large-scale than cell biology and genetics," she says.
In high school Ladenburger frequently perused the lists of possible college
scholarships that were posted in her high school's hallways. And her hard work
paid off: the mosquito scholarship is one of several helping finance her Calvin
education.
See the MMCA website at www.mimosq.org
-end-
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