team meeting at the National Institutes of Health.  yay for Powerpoint!

I love how my last post is titled “Three weeks in…” and now it’s literally three months in.  I can’t believe I’m already a third of the way through my grant — in many ways, I feel like I’ve just started to settle into my little life here in Manila, physically, mentally and emotionally.  But don’t get me wrong; every moment here has been rewarding and full of personal growth.  

So, let’s start with the research itself.  After a few delays, I’m finally starting to get my research off the ground.  So to recap from previous posts, I’m a research assistant at the National Institutes of Health (NIH-Manila) in the University of the Philippines-Manila.  It’s the premier health research unit in the Philippines, and works closely with the Department of Health to formulate health research that can impact national health policy (so cool!).  The project I am attached to is a baseline prevalence survey of soil-transmitted helminth infections in pregnant women and adolescent females.

“Huh?,” you say?  Well, let’s break it down.

Soil-transmitted helminth infections = worm infections.  Buggers like hookworm and roundworm infection are the bane of the developing world, infecting over a billion people worldwide, most of them impoverished.  Here’s a great overview on these lil buggers and neglected tropical diseases.  Hookworm infection in particular can cause iron deficiency anemia, which can exacerbate negative health outcomes in pregnant women and adolescent females, since their iron levels are already low to begin with.  

The problem is that there’s no data on worm infections in adolescent females and pregnant women!  How can you treat these women if you don’t know where they are?That’s why my host institution, NIH-Manila, is working with the Department of Health (DOH), the Department of Education, and selected local government units in the Philippines to implement this nationwide survey in several cities and provinces across the Philippines, so that future policy and practices can better target these two vulnerable populations.

I’m the head research assistant for this project, which means that I am in charge of basically coordinating the whole shebang:  contacting regional health coordinators, preparing workshops and training for the personell who will be handling the fieldwork, budgeting, etc., as well as getting involved with fieldwork too.  Oh, and fieldwork = poop (or “stool”, as those in the know say) collection and examination.  (Yes, the life of a parasitologist is very glamourous.)  Examination of an individual’s stool sample is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to diagnose worm infection, which makes it the diagnostic of choice in most wormy scenarios.

Right now I’m in the stage of establishing contact with all the stakeholders we need to get the project going on the ground — various DOH personell, local health center medical technicians, government officials, etc.   After that, it’s off to do orientations and training for the various personell who will be helping out with data collection in the various sites.  Data collection from adolescent females will start in April, while data collection from pregnant women will start in June.  

Ah, and I’m also at work on a review article on the problem of misdiagnosis of worm infections in the Philippines with the help of my adviser, Dr. Vicente Belizario.  Dr. Belizario is the Worm-Buster of the Philippines; his research has done a lot to enrich the health science community and influence the implementation of current worm control programs.  And he’s a killer pianist too!  Very amazing guy.    

More life-y stuff to come…