• Question: What is your most memorable scientific discovery?

    Asked by away46bat to Annette, Philip, Maxime, Jake, Ann, Amy Heather on 21 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by ring46cup.
    • Photo: Amy Heather Fitzpatrick

      Amy Heather Fitzpatrick answered on 21 Nov 2019:

      My personal favorite discovery was that I found out that if you take 100 oysters, only about two of them will have high levels of winter vomiting bug in them. We didn’t know this before. When we test oysters for viruses, we can take ten oysters and put them together in a tube. So when we get the result, that result is for the average concentration of virus in an oyster, not the exact amount in each oyster. So why is this important? This means that if you want to accurately test oyster for the winter vomiting bug, its important that you can take enough samples, as you need to catch the two that might have a lot of virus in them. If you only take ten from the same place in the bay… the test might say there is no virus and then the oysters could be sold and people get sick.

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