The Lab! (Oh how I have missed thee!)

*Sorry for the lateness of this post- the internet was slow here yesterday, it's hard to say why. Either it was national call your mother day in Zambia (so the lines were busy) or there was a misplaced cloud when I was trying to post.

 

We’ve spent almost two weeks at the Macha Research Trust campus, and today we finally got to see the lab! I love the lab! Sungano Mharaaurwa is the scientific director for the labs, and he talked with us about both the history of the research and what they are doing currently to study malaria (they are also studying HIV/AIDS and TB, but Sungano didn’t have 4 days to spend explaining all of that research to us, so we had to be content with hearing about the malaria lab). There are a number of interesting questions that they are working to address in the lab here. Questions of resistance to drugs, how the mosquitoes survive the dry season and they are trying to track some of the mosquitoes. I am sure you have all seen birds with tags on their legs, or know that they often will tag whales or sharks to track their migration. Imagine trying to tag or track a mosquito! There are so many of them and they are so tiny! They suspect that if they find one of their dye marked mosquitos that it represents many hundreds to thousands of mosquitoes! What a daunting task! 

I mentioned before that the buildings are decorated with various things- Here is Keane very excited to see the research labs studying (from left to right) DNA, the malaria parasite (in two forms, the little braclette thing is another form of malaria) and mosquitoes!

Sungano and Limonty gave us a tour of the lab.

 We have been talking about malaria in class as well. The cases of malaria and the disease prevalence in this area has been very significantly reduced over the last 15 years, due of course to a number of factors- many of them being Dr. Thuma’s idea. Malaria is one of those diseases that you don’t confront with just one weapon, but towards which you throw every possible solution. This has worked in this area, but it makes it very hard to piece out which of the tools of battle had the biggest impact on reducing malaria in this area. It is interesting to look at how the focus on malaria has changed over the years. Outside of the Macha area (for example the rest of Africa, South East Asia etc), fighting or eliminating malaria locally has had much less success. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago (in 2004 and again more recently) that Bill Gates has said that he will fund efforts to eradicate (they call it the ‘E’ word here) malaria worldwide. This is a VERY ambitious goal, and one that many people don’t think we (as the world) will ever achieve, but there is certainly a significant place for eliminating the disease in certain places, and for lowering the overall worldwide prevalence of the disease.  For this reason, even though malaria is nearly gone from this area, it is important to continue to study the disease here at Macha.

You might not get excited by seeing a full row of pipettemen, but aren't they beautiful?

In fact, one of the students on the trip, Keane, is staying here in Macha after the rest of us leave to go back to the US, and will be working in the lab with Sungano for the rest of the summer. I would love to stay as well, but didn’t have the foresight to make it a reality! Keane has already had some good lab experience at Messiah College, and will be well prepared to jump in and work on either a malaria or HIV/AIDS research project during his summer in Africa.  

Keane will be working with Sungano for the rest of the summer.