ASTMH: Day 3 (I think)

If today is Tuesday, than it's the official third day of the ASTMH conference (and yes, it's all run together that much that I no longer know). The day started with the first session at 8, just like yesterday. I attended the session on non-malaria fever in Africa, thinking it might be applicable to my job, but that might have been a mistake. I don't know if it was that I was so tired from the night before or if the speakers were just that non-engaging, but I found myself falling asleep during the presentations. I actually stood up during the last presentation, which was on a new algorithm for treating pediatric fever, because I actually wanted to stay awake to hear what she had to say. It was a really good presentation; her group had gone through and tested a lot of children (I forget the number) who came into the hospital with either fever, cough, or diarrhea, and then went back and correlated the signs and symptoms at presentation to what they actually had (malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, etc). They came up with a new algorithm for evaluating children that, when used properly, reduced the number of kids given antimalarials or antibiotics who didn't really need them. Pretty powerful stuff, if they can get wide-spread use of the new algorithm.

The second session I went to was also on global health, and wasn't really that great. Each session had multiple speakers, and the one I wanted to hear was about training community health workers on proper diagnosis and treatment of kids (a lot of the same stuff as the session before). However, the presenter didn't really discuss what the teaching was, just that it didn't work very well. Oh, well. At least I get continuing education credit for being there.

The best session all day was the lunch session on tropical medicine in temperate climates. It's a session given every year by the people at the London School of Tropical Medicine, because they have an entire ward of the hospital for tropical medicine. This year's cases were loa loa (African eye worm), West African trypanosomiasis (African Sleeping Sickness), and adverse reactions to malaria medications. Just for something to gross you out, here's a picture of loa loa:

Yes, that is a worm in a person's eye. It's gross (all pictures of eyes are gross), but the patient was properly diagnosed and treated and is now doing well (at least, that's what the doctors making the presentation tell me).

Tomorrow is my poster presentation on my dengue project, so I hope that goes well. After I'm done standing by my poster, I'm packing up my stuff and then heading for the airport, because it'll be time for me to go back to Savannah and work for a couple of days before I leave for Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro (should be a good time).