With everyone home from traveling and MK back from the US, the office has been much busier in the past couple days than in weeks prior. I have been working on some more data entry, which is wonderful because it’s helpful for everyone here, but it also doesn’t make for a particularly interesting blog topic. The data I’m looking at is the patient registers and mortality logs for the maternity wards and nurseries of different hospitals. When enough is collected and organized, this data will be used to notice trends in mortality and if there are any patterns in diagnoses that show particularly high death rates. If pneumonia is present and fatal in every hospital but one, then it would be important to see if they have a different means of treatment or if they simply diagnose in a different way. If most neonatal deaths are attributed to sepsis but none to birth asphyxia, it would be helpful for the CPAP team to decide whether there is a problem with the data and the records of the nurses, or if something more subtle is going on. By looking at this kind of information, we can get a lot more valuable feedback on the CPAP and on what kind of difference it is making around each nursery.

Over the weekend the other interns and myself drove north to the coast of Lake Malawi. The lake was beautiful and our lodge was very nice. On Saturday we took a boat around the lake, first to a beach, then to a small island with great snorkeling, and then to some rocks that you could jump off of into the lake. Every stop we made on the boat was incredible. The snorkeling was as good as I’ve done in the ocean, and the rock jumping was exhilarating.

The group at our lodge at Lake Malawi and a lake sunset

Before we went out, we were warned about Schistosomiasis, which is a parasitic worm found along the shores of the lake that can prove fatal. We all got medication from the hospital to take six weeks and twelve weeks after having been to the lake, so that if we happen to get the parasite we can kill it before it does much harm. Even with that medication, we were all a little wary of getting in the water out of fear of the worm. We felt more justified swimming because the sink and shower water was also from the lake, so trying to avoid the water would be a little futile.

We are very fortunate that there is medication available so that we would all be able to have such a fun weekend, but of all the people that get in the lake we are a select few. People who live along the lake wash their clothes and dishes in the water. They bathe in it. The area we were in was not particularly wealthy, and when you hardly have enough money for food you won’t be shelling any out for Schistosomiasis medication. We didn’t have a lot of time to investigate, but I was very curious about how the locals deal with the parasites in the water. I don’t know if they have some sort of immunity, or they know where in the lake not to swim, or if they just get the worm and deal with it. A lot of the children I met were small for their age but had the protruding belly that is a telltale sign of malnutrition; I wondered if some of them were also suffering from Schistosomiasis and their abdomens were swollen because of the parasite.

My friend Sofina that I met at the beach

The lake was a wonderful trip but also a very informative one; and I am very glad for the opportunity both to have such a great weekend and to come to a more enlightened understanding of this country and the way it’s people live.