Wednesday I was in the CCC for another morning, this time with the dermatologist. As on Tuesday, the CCC is for people with HIV, so the patients in the derm clinic are also HIV+. This was set up this way because there are a lot of skin conditions either associated with HIV, or associated with opportunistic infections of HIV. This way, they get to go to the same building, and it’s easier for everyone involved. I only saw three patients, because dermatology patients take a while. Two of those were fairly common skin conditions (one was eczema), but the other essentially had warts over his entire body. With one wart, you can just freeze it off, but when there are that many, there’s not much that you can do. The only thing that could be done is to get him started on HIV medications; once his immune system improves, the skin condition will also improve.
I also gave a CME (Continuing Medical Education) on Wednesday, on tropical hematology (blood diseases). Unfortunately, the computer and projector weren’t working, so I had to give the presentation off the cuff. I don’t know how well received it was, but I am disappointed that I didn’t get to use my PowerPoint with its nifty background (that I designed).
After the CME, COL Coldren and I headed down to Kilifi, to meet with one of his former employees from while he was stationed in Kenya, who is now a Ph.D. in virology and works at Wellcome Trust, which is a massive research facility. Here's a picture of COL Coldren and Clayton at Wellcome Trust:
We’re also staying at the hotel where COL Coldren got married, so that had a few funny stories associated with it (his wife isn’t Kenyan; she’s Australian, they just met in Kenya and eloped while they were both here). This is pretty much where they had their wedding pictures taken:
Anyway, the labs at Wellcome Trust rival those in the new research building at OSU, which was completed in 2008. It’s pretty amazing. Clayton, the former employee, got his Ph.D. from England, but did the work in Gambia (Western Africa) on HIV-2, which is a less virulent form of HIV (the most common HIV worldwide is HIV-1). There are some people who are infected with HIV-2 who never have any signs of it—no opportunistic infections, no immune problems, nothing—so his dissertation had to do with why some people have such a mild disease course, and if that can be used to come up with a way to fight HIV-1. Short story is, HIV-2 has some different genes than HIV-1, and some people have different immunology to it, and unfortunately, having HIV-2 does not protect against having bad effects of HIV-1. The hope was that it could be used to vaccinate against HIV-1, but that’s not the case at all.
We got a tour of the lab facilities today, pictured above, but only after I got the opportunity to do some scuba diving. Unfortunately, conditions weren’t too great for diving in Kilifi Bay, so we did the dive in Kilifi Creek, which is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not a creek; it’s the mouth of the river that dumps into the Indian Ocean. So it’s actually quite wide and quite calm, but not too exciting. There was some coral, and some typical small reef fish, but nothing too terribly exciting. I guess I’ll still have to do some diving in Malindi to see some reefs.
After the tour of the lab, we went out to dinner with Clayton’s family. His wife is a journalist doing some correspondence work for a media outlet in South Africa, and they have two kids, a three-year-old daughter and 10-month-old son, both of whom were very cute and had a lot of energy. It was a very fun dinner, and very good, but I’m still sitting here very uncomfortably full from all the food. That’s life, I guess. Here's a picture from where we had dinner, near sunset:
Tomorrow: relaxing around the hotel in the morning, then heading back to Malindi, just in time to enjoy another grueling weekend J
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