DrPH Student Gabriela Abrego Awarded CDC Internship

Gabriela Abrego, student in the East Tennessee State University College of Public Health’s doctoral program in Epidemiology, has been selected for an internship with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  The internship, within the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, will be a part of the Neural Tube Defects (NTD) Surveillance and Prevention Team.

The team works to prevent neural tube defects and improve maternal and infant health outcomes. About 260,000 to 300,000 cases of neural tube defects occur worldwide each year, disproportionately affecting  low to middle resource countries. Many of these defects can be prevented if a woman consumes adequate folic acid before and during early pregnancy. One of the biggest challenges to preventing these and other birth defects is lack of awareness both of the impact of these conditions on the health and well-being of children and of potential interventions.  

The NTD Surveillance and Prevention Team works to explore and assess neural tube defects prevention strategies.  Team members monitor and assess folic acid intake, risk factors for low uptake, and safety of folic acid, as well as address micronutrient health disparities and increase folic acid intake among sub-groups of the population who remain at-risk in the United States.  The team examines the impact of nutritional (micronutrient) deficiencies on pregnancy and adverse reproductive outcomes, and also partners with stakeholders on prevention strategies.

“Internships in public health are also for the benefit of public health practice as a whole because it adds to the training of future public health professionals,” said Ms. Abrego.

As an intern, Ms. Abrego will serve as a bilingual public health epidemiology assistant to support an updated review examining neural tube defect prevalence in Latin America including folic acid supplementation. She will work to better understand voluntary folic acid fortification of corn masa flour in the U.S. as well as review and update education materials on folic acid and birth defects prevention that are targeted for the Hispanic community.

Ms. Abrego’s tasks will also include updating a systematic review of studies and reports published on neural tube defects in Latin America between 2010 and 2020 to estimate prevalence of these defects before and after folic acid fortification periods to assess the impact of fortification on their prevalence.  

 “This HACU (Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities) sponsored internship allows me to not only apply skills I have learned in the classroom but to learn new ones in the field,” stated Ms. Abrego.  “It also allows me to see what public health is like on the federal level at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as that is the career path I would like to take.”