Hi there, everyone! Thanks so much for your comments and your emails. I'll do my best to keep up!
On Thursday morning, Adriana and I flew to El Vigía and then took a bus to Mérida, which is high in the Andes and bordered on all sides by mountains. It will be my first site for the project. On Friday morning, we met with the aquatic insect group at the Universidad de Los Andes. They were extraordinarily helpful and gave lots of wonderful feedback regarding the project, including potential site changes. We're in the midst of revising that now. Also, they gave us contact information to obtain the offical dengue numbers for the state. We tried to meet up with the doctor who has the information, but a demonstration in the middle of the city made the route impassable. We're meeting tomorrow instead. Also, we went to the mapatecas (the awesome word for map libraries!) and found maps for the cities that we want to use. Unfortunately some are nearly 50 years old, and the region has changed much, but we'll work on supplementing that bare-bones information with Google Earth or other satellite data. We have to return to the mapateca on Monday, since the electricity cut out just as we were about to print. It was a long day, but this was all a huge amount of work to get done.
Adriana has been super wonderful. On Thursday, I was stopped in the airport by the people doing swine flu surveillance and sent to the public health desk. This was despite the fact that I've been in the country longer than the incubation period, but I decided not to argue very much with the nice soldier. Adriana struck up a conversation with the public health woman and got the contact information for the dengue surveillance people in the city. It was pretty awesome. She's clearly very good at convincing people to give us information, and I'm trying to learn Spanish tricks from her.
My Spanish is improving amazingly. Even I can tell. I'm starting to use it reflexively to ask and answer questions, and I no longer hesitate over every word. A very strange thing has also started to happen where the words for things just fill themselves in, even though I thought that I had forgotten them years ago. It's far from fluent, but it's definitely better.
OK, the cyber cafe is closing. Oops. Ciao!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Plan
Now that I have you all hooked (or a few of you anyway), let's talk about the science!
Dengue fever is a disease caused by a virus which is carried by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. There's no vaccination and no treatment. It can sometimes lead to the more severe disease known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, which usually happens after someone has had a case of dengue fever already from one of the other serotypes. There are four serotypes.
The mosquito lives primarily in cities and breeds in artificial water containers such as water tanks, tires, buckets, and discarded trash filled with rainwater. The mosquito is also the vector for yellow fever, so there was a big push to eradicate it from the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. But efforts waned, and rapid urbanization provided plenty of breeding grounds, and the mosquito came back in the 1970s and now covers even more area than it had inhabited before.
The point of my work this summer is to look at the distribution of the mosquito in cities in the Venezuelan Andes. We're interested in looking both between cities (what makes the cities different?) and within cities (what makes parts of the same city different from each other?). For these analyses, we'll be collecting data about the climate as well as information about population density, frequency of trash collection, and other socioeconomic variables. We're also interested in what we can learn from satellite data ("remote sensing") about city structure and its thermal properties and the change in the city over time. Oh right, and the mosquitoes.
The real work of the summer will be studying the mosquitoes. I'm going to four cities in the Andes mountain region: Mérida, Lagunillas, Barinas, and Barinitas. The first two are in the mountains, the second two in the plains next to the mountains. The first of each pair is large and the second is small. I'll have square (-ish, let's be realistic) sample sites picked out for each city, and within each "cell" we'll go door-to-door, requesting participation in the study. We have a questionnaire about household information and recent history of dengue, and then we'll survey the house and yard for larvae or potential breeding grounds.
The use of squares or cells is actually a bit new. Usually, surveyors just count 50 houses or 100 houses as they walk up a street and call it a day. However, that method doesn't work well if we want to coordinate our data with information from the satellite images. Remote sensing studies are pretty new in itself, and I think we'll be able to get a lot of information about neighborhood change and its effects on the mosquito distribution from this one in addition to the information about the effect of climate/altitude on the distribution between cities.
Well, that's a lot. So I'll leave it there for now. Let me know if there are any questions, as I could write (and have written) pages and pages more about this project.
On Thursday I leave for Mérida with Adriana, one of the lab techs here at UCV. We just purchased our flights today, which is a bit more of a last-minute approach than usual. I'll be leaving Sarah, the other public health student from Yale, here in Caracas. She's taking on the mosquitoes which carry malaria in the mangroves of the northern beaches. We used to joke at the University of Maryland about "studying beach malaria" during our vacations, and I think I'm going to let them know that it actually exists.
Dengue fever is a disease caused by a virus which is carried by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. There's no vaccination and no treatment. It can sometimes lead to the more severe disease known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, which usually happens after someone has had a case of dengue fever already from one of the other serotypes. There are four serotypes.
The mosquito lives primarily in cities and breeds in artificial water containers such as water tanks, tires, buckets, and discarded trash filled with rainwater. The mosquito is also the vector for yellow fever, so there was a big push to eradicate it from the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s. But efforts waned, and rapid urbanization provided plenty of breeding grounds, and the mosquito came back in the 1970s and now covers even more area than it had inhabited before.
The point of my work this summer is to look at the distribution of the mosquito in cities in the Venezuelan Andes. We're interested in looking both between cities (what makes the cities different?) and within cities (what makes parts of the same city different from each other?). For these analyses, we'll be collecting data about the climate as well as information about population density, frequency of trash collection, and other socioeconomic variables. We're also interested in what we can learn from satellite data ("remote sensing") about city structure and its thermal properties and the change in the city over time. Oh right, and the mosquitoes.
The real work of the summer will be studying the mosquitoes. I'm going to four cities in the Andes mountain region: Mérida, Lagunillas, Barinas, and Barinitas. The first two are in the mountains, the second two in the plains next to the mountains. The first of each pair is large and the second is small. I'll have square (-ish, let's be realistic) sample sites picked out for each city, and within each "cell" we'll go door-to-door, requesting participation in the study. We have a questionnaire about household information and recent history of dengue, and then we'll survey the house and yard for larvae or potential breeding grounds.
The use of squares or cells is actually a bit new. Usually, surveyors just count 50 houses or 100 houses as they walk up a street and call it a day. However, that method doesn't work well if we want to coordinate our data with information from the satellite images. Remote sensing studies are pretty new in itself, and I think we'll be able to get a lot of information about neighborhood change and its effects on the mosquito distribution from this one in addition to the information about the effect of climate/altitude on the distribution between cities.
Well, that's a lot. So I'll leave it there for now. Let me know if there are any questions, as I could write (and have written) pages and pages more about this project.
On Thursday I leave for Mérida with Adriana, one of the lab techs here at UCV. We just purchased our flights today, which is a bit more of a last-minute approach than usual. I'll be leaving Sarah, the other public health student from Yale, here in Caracas. She's taking on the mosquitoes which carry malaria in the mangroves of the northern beaches. We used to joke at the University of Maryland about "studying beach malaria" during our vacations, and I think I'm going to let them know that it actually exists.
Flux
Flux is the name of this really great card game that Sarah M and Bob taught me to play a few years ago. The basic concept is that the goals and the rules are always being changed by the players as they try to create the most advantageous position for themselves. It's the best analogy that is coming to mind to describe my adventures in setting up a budget here. Prices change, terms change, and schedules change. The really difficult part is that I'm not allowed to change the rules. I think I should earn something like a gazillion intelligence points if I can get through this one.
I may be a bit cranky because I just got over a flux of a different sort. Sarita and I went to the mall on Friday night, which was huge and brand-new, two stories above ground and five or six below with a central atrium open all the way. It was a pretty impressive mall. Unfortunately, something that I ate there decided not to get along with the bacteria already in my stomach, and on Saturday morning the natives staged a revolt. I'll spare you the details; it suffices to say that I didn't go to the beach that afternoon.
I will say that I've been very impressed with the hospitality of the people here. When I was green and looking pretty awful outside of a metro station and trying to return to the apartment, a woman came over and gave me water. I am incredibly grateful for her kindness. She also asked if I was pregnant and looked skeptical when I said no, but I'm not inclined to be particular about my angels.
I may be a bit cranky because I just got over a flux of a different sort. Sarita and I went to the mall on Friday night, which was huge and brand-new, two stories above ground and five or six below with a central atrium open all the way. It was a pretty impressive mall. Unfortunately, something that I ate there decided not to get along with the bacteria already in my stomach, and on Saturday morning the natives staged a revolt. I'll spare you the details; it suffices to say that I didn't go to the beach that afternoon.
I will say that I've been very impressed with the hospitality of the people here. When I was green and looking pretty awful outside of a metro station and trying to return to the apartment, a woman came over and gave me water. I am incredibly grateful for her kindness. She also asked if I was pregnant and looked skeptical when I said no, but I'm not inclined to be particular about my angels.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Malas Palabras
Last night, a young man was stopped for disturbing the peace outside of the apartments where I am staying. The police rather undermined their own cause with the sirens and lights, but no matter. Carina, David, and their neighbors in the the apartments up and down the street all came to the balcony to watch the guy get searched and to add their own reprimands. There were quite a few things yelled, and David started laughing and asked whether I understood any of it. Obviously, this is obviously not your common schoolbook vocabulary. Carina became indignant that they were not in her Spanish-English dictionary and is going to file a complaint with the publisher.
Sarah told me that when she and her host mother returned home from the store yesterday, she met a man who is the father of the guy who sat next to us on the plane from DC to Miami. The man gives accordian lessons to the host mother, and when Sarah was introduced as an international student at UCV, he asked whether or not she was a public health student (insert weird freak-out stalker moment here). He then said that his son went to Harvard and had mentioned the two Yale students from the plane to his dad. So now we might have dinner with a German Jewish accordian player and his Harvard economist son in Caracas. Weird, right?
To assure you all that I am actually working, today I talked with people at the INH (like our NIH) about dengue caseload and I obtained GIS files with streets and city outlines for the country. It's exciting to be getting the information after all the time spent preparing. I'm still working on the logistics of getting to Mérida, my first field site in the Andes, since the lab truck needs repairing. There is a lot to do, including eat dinner, which I am going to do now. ¡Ciao!
Sarah told me that when she and her host mother returned home from the store yesterday, she met a man who is the father of the guy who sat next to us on the plane from DC to Miami. The man gives accordian lessons to the host mother, and when Sarah was introduced as an international student at UCV, he asked whether or not she was a public health student (insert weird freak-out stalker moment here). He then said that his son went to Harvard and had mentioned the two Yale students from the plane to his dad. So now we might have dinner with a German Jewish accordian player and his Harvard economist son in Caracas. Weird, right?
To assure you all that I am actually working, today I talked with people at the INH (like our NIH) about dengue caseload and I obtained GIS files with streets and city outlines for the country. It's exciting to be getting the information after all the time spent preparing. I'm still working on the logistics of getting to Mérida, my first field site in the Andes, since the lab truck needs repairing. There is a lot to do, including eat dinner, which I am going to do now. ¡Ciao!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
On the Metro
I take the metro to work and back to the apartment. It's efficient and clean and easy to use, and I'm very impressed with it. It's a 40 minute trip, which gives me plenty of time to people-watch.
One of the first things that I noticed was the fashion. Everyone here wears pants, and there is hardly a skirt or pair of shorts in sight. More specifically, the vast majority of people wear jeans. Whether old, young, men, women, clearly upper-middle-class or clearly blue-collar, everyone wears jeans. There are occassionally black pants and more rarely khakis. I even snuck a look at a classroom building to check -- yep, the professors wear jeans. I don't know whether this is a caraqueño thing or a venezolano thing, but I'll find out when I get to Mérida.
Another thing is that there are lots of overweight people. And no small wonder -- all of the food that I've had so far is excellent, but very little of it has been healthy. Since arrival, I've eaten grilled cheese and ham, arepas (a sort of fried stuffed pita), "chinese" food which consisted of chicken in sweet and sour sauce with french fries and fried crab, a margherita pizza that was heavy on the cheese, and toast and jelly. Today, Sarah and I bought fruit and I ate that and only that for lunch. The fruit was amazing, but I'm doubtful that lunch fruit really compensates for the rest.
I've known that obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases are big issues in the developing world, but it hadn't hit home until these past few days. I know that the US is tackling its own nutritional problems, so the fact that I notice a dramatic change here is telling.
One of the first things that I noticed was the fashion. Everyone here wears pants, and there is hardly a skirt or pair of shorts in sight. More specifically, the vast majority of people wear jeans. Whether old, young, men, women, clearly upper-middle-class or clearly blue-collar, everyone wears jeans. There are occassionally black pants and more rarely khakis. I even snuck a look at a classroom building to check -- yep, the professors wear jeans. I don't know whether this is a caraqueño thing or a venezolano thing, but I'll find out when I get to Mérida.
Another thing is that there are lots of overweight people. And no small wonder -- all of the food that I've had so far is excellent, but very little of it has been healthy. Since arrival, I've eaten grilled cheese and ham, arepas (a sort of fried stuffed pita), "chinese" food which consisted of chicken in sweet and sour sauce with french fries and fried crab, a margherita pizza that was heavy on the cheese, and toast and jelly. Today, Sarah and I bought fruit and I ate that and only that for lunch. The fruit was amazing, but I'm doubtful that lunch fruit really compensates for the rest.
I've known that obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases are big issues in the developing world, but it hadn't hit home until these past few days. I know that the US is tackling its own nutritional problems, so the fact that I notice a dramatic change here is telling.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Arrival
Hola todos,
I arrived in Caracas last night, and I am now waiting to meet with Juan Carlos Navarro, my host here at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. I am typing on a Mac computer that has been set up for Spanish, and it was a very exciting moment when we discovered the @ symbol's location (alt plus g, FYI).
The Univesidad has a very open architecture. It reminds me a little bit of the schools that I've seen in the southern US, with lots of courtyards and gardens and walkways that are open to the weather. There is even a small garden in the center courtyard of the Instituto Zoologica, right next to the labs.
I am staying this week with the brother-in-law of my professor and with his wife, David and Carina. They are very hospitable, and last night we talked for several hours. David teaches Spanish literature and studies Greek mythology, and Carina works as a systems engineer and is trying to learn French as well as English. Their apartment is very close to the Metro, which I can use to get to the university.
That's all for this post -- I will write more on my project and on Caracas later!
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