Boat rides and malaria slides

Well, I figured now was as good of time as any to give you some pictures. This first one is the lab where I've been "working" for the last couple of days, NMRCD-Peru, Iquitos Laboratory.

And here's the picture of catching mosquitoes that I promised you yesterday. It's essentially a low-powered vacuum that sucks up mosquitoes and captures them live in a little cup, to be taken back to the lab to be counted and later processed.

Okay. So now what I did yesterday. The day started with arriving at the lab for what I thought was a lecture about malaria in the Iquitos area. What ended up happening was a boat ride to Padre Cocha, a village up a river that feeds into the Amazon. And no, nobody speaks English in Padre Cocha, including the microbiologists who study the blood smears to diagnose malaria. I did learn, mostly through pictures and hand gestures and whatnot (actually, a lot of science-type words are the same in any language), how to tell the difference between the different forms of malaria (P. falciprum and P.vivax) on a blood smear, and the research projects that they're doing on length of treatment for each of those infections. Of the two blood smears we had to look at for that day, one was positive for vivax, and the other was negative for any form of malaria.

Before leaving Padre Cocha to head back into Iquitos, we stopped by a butterfly farm/animal rescue, which is run by an Austrian woman who speaks no fewer than four languages (she was giving the tour simultaneously in Spanish, English, French, and German). They have there a boa constrictor, a few parrots (or similar large, brightly-colored bird), a couple of crocodiles that found their way in, a river manatee, a few monkeys, and a jaguar. The jaguar apparently costs about 1000 soles a week (about $350) to feed, because they only eat raw meat. Although the primary mission of this animal rescue is to return animals to health and find a place to release them into the wild, that isn't possible with this one, because it has completely lost its fear of people (and releasing a large cat that eats raw meat and isn't afraid of people into the wild is bound to result in a few people being eaten). So they keep it, which is rather expensive, and the reason why they didn't want to take any felines in the first place.

So, that was the morning yesterday. Then, after lunch, I went with some of the lab employees (and an entomology grad student from UC-Davis who essentially served as my translator) to see a patient with dengue. Very interesting, but didn't look like much fun. I've been staring at my mosquito bites ever since, hoping that none of them were carrying dengue. Guess we'll find out in 4-10 days...