I've started my new job within CHAI on the global lab systems team, and my travel schedule has been as follows:
August 22 - Arrive back from the US at 7am, leave for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at 5pm for meetings with Ethiopia team
August 23 - Return to Kampala
August 28 - Fly to Nairobi for meetings
August 29 - Return to Kampala
September 2 - Back to Nairobi, more meetings
September 5 - Return to Kampala
September 9 - Fly to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for a conference
and to come
September 15- Fly to Mozambique to do operational research in health centers on point-of-care testing for CD4 in HIV patients
Return to Kampala sometime between September 21 and October 2....
So far I've made a lot of progress in filling up my passport and sampling East Africa's finest Asian food, and I have also been able to meet the CHAI teams around the region. We're in the process of launching a 4 year project on the lab systems team, so there is a lot of "workplanning" to be done -- I'm working on a CHAI team that is administering a $95mn grant in 7 countries (Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia) that is procuring point-of-care laboratory diagnostics for HIV with the aim of creating a healthy, competitive market in these diagnostics.
The work is building a lot on the work I did in rolling out point-of-care CD4 testing in Uganda last year with the Ministry of Health, but it's expanding on that work both geographically and in scope, as the project is looking at CD4 (test of immunological status needed to determine when patients can initiate anti-retroviral therapy), viral load (test primarily used to determine whether patients on treatment have become resistant to the drugs they are on) and Early Infant Diagnosis (test to determine whether infants are infected - the standard antibody tests don't work for babies because they carry their mothers' antibodies, so they have to be tested through a complicated DNA PCR test), and also dabbling in tuberculosis diagnostics. The tests are important because they help patients access the right treatment faster.
I'm excited about the project, and the travel is fun and interesting for now at least! Leaving Kampala means I get to eat better seafood (I'm staying in a hotel overlooking the Indian ocean), more variety of food, and both frozen yogurt and Belgian beer in Nairobi.... both of which made me way more excited than is reasonable.
Said beer (which is not actually that amazing, but has about 10 times more flavor than anything normally sold in East Africa):
Wonderful hotel in Nairobi:
Hopefully all this travel will give me some better photo-taking opportunities than I've had so far in hotels and meeting rooms! And hopefully I'll get to spend time in health centers in these places to get a sense of what the universals are and what the unique challenges of each country are. One of the reasons I was excited to move to this team was to be able to get a broader perspective of global health challenges beyond just one country.
August 22 - Arrive back from the US at 7am, leave for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at 5pm for meetings with Ethiopia team
August 23 - Return to Kampala
August 28 - Fly to Nairobi for meetings
August 29 - Return to Kampala
September 2 - Back to Nairobi, more meetings
September 5 - Return to Kampala
September 9 - Fly to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for a conference
and to come
September 15- Fly to Mozambique to do operational research in health centers on point-of-care testing for CD4 in HIV patients
Return to Kampala sometime between September 21 and October 2....
So far I've made a lot of progress in filling up my passport and sampling East Africa's finest Asian food, and I have also been able to meet the CHAI teams around the region. We're in the process of launching a 4 year project on the lab systems team, so there is a lot of "workplanning" to be done -- I'm working on a CHAI team that is administering a $95mn grant in 7 countries (Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia) that is procuring point-of-care laboratory diagnostics for HIV with the aim of creating a healthy, competitive market in these diagnostics.
The work is building a lot on the work I did in rolling out point-of-care CD4 testing in Uganda last year with the Ministry of Health, but it's expanding on that work both geographically and in scope, as the project is looking at CD4 (test of immunological status needed to determine when patients can initiate anti-retroviral therapy), viral load (test primarily used to determine whether patients on treatment have become resistant to the drugs they are on) and Early Infant Diagnosis (test to determine whether infants are infected - the standard antibody tests don't work for babies because they carry their mothers' antibodies, so they have to be tested through a complicated DNA PCR test), and also dabbling in tuberculosis diagnostics. The tests are important because they help patients access the right treatment faster.
I'm excited about the project, and the travel is fun and interesting for now at least! Leaving Kampala means I get to eat better seafood (I'm staying in a hotel overlooking the Indian ocean), more variety of food, and both frozen yogurt and Belgian beer in Nairobi.... both of which made me way more excited than is reasonable.
Said beer (which is not actually that amazing, but has about 10 times more flavor than anything normally sold in East Africa):
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