Think your job's bad? Try worm parasitology

CHICAGO — For the second year in a row, William Speed Weed, contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, has had the duty of calling scientists and announcing: "We've determined that you have one of the worst jobs in science."

"Some get quite indignant," Weed said. "The worm parasitologists (No. 2 on the magazine's Worst Science Jobs II list) were like that. I had to call several before finding one who'd talk."

He found Eric Ottesen of Emory University. "We can't show pictures or really even talk about these diseases," Ottesen said. "Society just isn't ready for it."

One worm that no one wants to know intimately is the female Dracunculus medinensis. After migrating from the gut, she settles just under the skin, where she grows to as much as 3 feet long and then lays her eggs.

"When the thousands of babies make their joyous arrival," Weed writes, "they blister the skin and pop through, leaving Mom behind. The traditional way to get rid of her is to wrap her head around a stick and twist very slowly — one turn of the stick per day — for weeks or months, depending on how long she is." (Many believe that ancient treatment gave rise to the snake-curled-around-a-pole symbol of the medical profession.)

Most veterinarians choose that career because they love animals. But Colorado State University vet David Neil told Weed, "A very interesting transition takes place if you go into lab work. You go from someone who makes sick animals healthy to someone who makes healthy animals sick." Research vet is No. 3 on the list.

If you hold Worst Job No. 9 — assessing the risk of Lyme disease — you have to trudge through dense forests dragging a white corduroy sheet, stopping after 20 meters to remove hundreds of possibly infected ticks from the sheet and yourself and dropping them in a jar. Then you go another 20 meters, and another, and another.

Then there are scientists who specialize in sexually transmitted diseases. Two of their number made the list: researchers who study anal warts and those who study vaginal infections.

Next year's list is being planned, with, Weed said, "some sort of surprise. We've got some ideas, but nothing I can talk about."

This year, members of four of the 17 professions in the Popular Science list stepped forward to say just how awful their jobs were. Most prominent among them were nurses, No. 10 on the list.

"Doctors treat you like slaves," one wrote. "The pay is substandard for all the training," another said.

The rest of us should care. Studies show that surgical patients in hospitals with the most overworked nurses have a 31 percent greater chance of dying.

Another profession scientists nominated for the list was science journalist. "I think a lot of times they were just having fun with me," said Weed.

The real scientists said science journalists miss out on the chance to do real science themselves and are forced to simplify the subjects they cover.

"Some scientists," Weed said, "especially those who have a unique specialty, like the anal-wart researcher (Naomi Jay of the University of California, San Francisco), seem proud of their chosen professions."

Indeed, on last year's list, a group of dysentery researchers, whose job it is to poke around in feces, had T-shirts made with a cartoon of one fly asking another, "Is this stool taken?"