Virtus Strategic Consulting
Course Description:
VSC’s Tropical Medicine training is focused on empowering healthcare practitioners operating in remote and austere settings.
Keeping a team - or refugee camp - healthy and disease-free requires that practitioners be armed with an up-to-date understanding of disease processes, clinical signs, diagnostic tools, mitigation strategies and treatment options relevant to their area of operation.
Participants will learn about the fundamental differences between viruses, bacteria, protozoa and helminths; the latest in snakebite and marine envenomation therapy; immunopathology; ectoparasites; and the top five infectious disease killers in the world - to include diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and pneumonia.
While the span of Tropical Medicine will be given attention in both the one or two-day course, special attention will be paid to vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue virus. Vector-borne diseases are often the most difficult diseases to avoid and, in the case of malaria, may progress quickly to death in non-immune patients, even those on chemoprophylaxis. Malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are among the most important of all diagnostic tools in the tropics, and these will be practiced with in all Virtus Tropical Medicine training programs.
Your Instructor:
VCS Cadre
Jason Jarvis is Virtus’ Director of Operational Medicine Training. He is a paramedic and former U.S. Army Special Forces Medical Sergeant (18D) with years of accumulated experience as an austere primary medicine practitioner in resource-poor countries such as Laos, Burma, Iraq and Afghanistan. He completed his first transect of Africa in 2021, teaching deployment medicine courses for healthcare practitioners in Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya under the auspices of the United Nations. Based in Seattle, Jason is a medical educator for Harborview Medical Center, Children’s Hospital of Seattle, and the College of Remote and Offshore Medicine. He is a recurrent presenter at the annual Special Operations Medical Scientific Assembly, an article reviewer for International Health and the Journal of Special Operations Medicine, and is pursuing a master’s degree in Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.