schisto project and malaria project

Hello Everyone,

I have had a problem keeping up with the email updates this trip due to the power outages and unavailability to internet but here is an update of what has been going on so far. I wanted to congratulate Katy and Ty and spouses on their marriage. I also just found out that I passed my boards! I don’t know the score yet, but I guess I will just have to wait until I get home unless they have mailed the scores to my house in SLC. Also I just got paying the bills for my house. It is kind of crazy to think that even though I am on the other side of the planet, my bills and debts keep following me. I guess that is life.

Here is a summary of what has happened so far. On Saturday, we had the long waited for Schisto day in Barekuma. There was an official ceremony where the doctors explained in Twi what was going to happen and the challenges of controlling schisto. They had rented tents and all of the village leaders were wearing their traditional gowns. It was pretty spectacular. We then had people register and get their urine cups and then come back after they had filled them. We then used our dipsticks to measure if there was blood or protein. We then gave prescriptions to those who were positive. We had over 530 people pass through and had to cut the line short because we had to get back to Kumasi and the time that it took. Because the project turned into solely prevalence instead of the prevention (which will be next year), we took 400 of the samples and are counting the schisto eggs to see how bad the problem is. It is the first and necessary step to try to combat this problem which is a lot bigger than I expected. We also need used the study to find out what activities and frequency people use the river. We also need to find out the beliefs of the people about how they get schisto in order to help prevent it. The villagers during the meeting came up with some pretty good questions and it showed how necessary that they are involved in the process on how to prevent schisto. I felt pretty honored by the fact that this project has become a major focus of the doctors from the U and Ghana and how they used my inexperienced and rough outline of a study as a baseline.

It has been quite a challenge trying to get through the red tape and obtaining the supplies that we need for the project. I ran into a couple of problems such as not having the key to read 1600 of the 2000 dipsticks because it didn’t come in the package, then I let someone use my notebook with the information the day before the project and they lost it. However, we were lucky because the page with the key had been accidentally ripped out and was lying on the floor in the guesthouse where we were staying. Then during the testing we found that because we had different urine dipsticks, some of the tests required a longer reaction time than others, so we had to retest around 30 of them and found people positive that weren’t positive on the other test. I also mentioned before that I had to call Christina to get on the internet for me and then we finally hunted down the supplies and ended up buying a fridge for the lab. I also had to make 4000 copies. We were going to make copies at the hospital, and they told me that we had to buy some more toner. The toner was $70 and paper was $30 and I thought that we could get copies cheaper at a local place. Anyways I found a place that made copies for 5 cents a piece and I thought that it would be around $20 dollars and that I was saving us money however, it was actually $200 and I had to explain this to my professor. He was fine but I was pretty embarrassed. I will analyze the data when I get home. It was a good project and I learned a lot. It was pretty exciting to see the chief and the elders in the village participate and encourage the village to participate. They made us Foo foo which is the consistency of bread dough made out of cassava put into a spicy soup. They also gave us goat. I ate the whole thing and I can’t say how much I love goat meat!

On Sunday, we worked on a malaria study in a different village to see the prevalence in kids under the age of 3. I worked in the lab doing the quick tests by putting blood on the tests and reagents and working with the Ghanian doctors to do blood smears and fill capillary tubes with blood from the finger pricks of the kids. Ironically I didn’t mind that the kids were crying and actually found it pretty funny to see some of their reactions. A lot of them would start crying before we did anything, others started at the sight of blood, and others could care less what we were doing. I was also happy that the Ghanian docs and even Dr Alder would ask me to organize and get things done for them. Although I had made mistakes before, it felt good to be trusted with responsibility. It was sad though to see that over a third of the children in the village had malaria and most of them had the most aggressive type. However, most of them weren’t symptomatic enough to be hospitalized. It at least made me feel better to see this with all of my mosquito bites that I have. I haven’t been sick (not even diarrhea) this whole trip and I attribute this to the doxycycline prophylaxis for malaria. I love this stuff!

I will send an email later about Cape coast!
Scott