Life In A Lab

Ahhh African life where you're seated at the dinner table and the electricity goes and you wonder why on earth you opted for a summer in a third world country. I also can't deal with this topping up business, it's rinsing me of money. I should stop being a miserable Brit.

So, in other news! Yesterday was Monday which means yes, I did it, I finally shifted out of Blood Bank. And I'm at home with the familiar world of biochemistry. But we'll come back to that. I want to tell you guys about a few random bits and bobs first.

I had the opportunity to visit the University of North Carolina (UNC) labs and the microbiology lab which was nice to break it up a little. In my last post I talked about the samples I tested for TB. Turns out, there's a neat piece of software that can test for the antibiotic resistant strains but KCH are unable to afford it. Which meant that one of the guys had to take the samples over to the UNC labs and he was kind enough to let me tag along.

They're on the same "campus" of sorts, but independent of the hospital. They report back to headquarters (I feel like I'm reporting on some CIA mission) in Italy who in turn are headed by North Carolina, USA. Anyway. Whilst the KCH labs are purely diagnostic, these labs are focused on research. So as opposed to samples requiring a medical analysis, they receive samples of patients that are subjects of a research study.

One of the head guys there gave me a tiny tour and got talking about his life; he incidentally did his Master's degree at the University of Bradford (and surprisingly hated the UK so came back to Malawi). He was telling me about their current research projects, all of which, understandably, fall under the umbrella of HIV. Bar one. He just completed work on the study of a malaria vaccine which took him and his team from 2008-2013, with the results still awaiting analysis and publication. Keep your eyes peeled in Nature guys. At the moment though he's working on a study that's trying to find a causative link between TB and cancer with the root cause being HIV as HIV increases susceptibility to, and thus probability of contracting TB and/or cancer.

On that note, I'm shocked at the number of samples I'm testing with ward information stating "oncology" and I look at their age, and it says 20. It's heartbreaking to think of young adults my age already suffering from the biggest killer disease in an underdeveloped country.

Oooh and the micro lab. Bear in mind I hate micro with a passion. I've mentioned that before haven't I? Go figure. But it was worth seeing what they're about. They mainly study samples of ascetic fluid, pleural fluid, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and HVS (high vaginal swabs in rape cases) to pick up any diseases or in the latter, to aid an investigation.

I should point out that studying CSF samples is incredibly rare in the UK and only done in the case of an absolute emergency. Mainly because it involves sticking a large, thin needle into the lumbar region of the spinal cord to penetrate the bone and retrieve the CSF and the danger of destroying the nerves that span out from the spinal cord is immense to say the least. Yet here it's so routine. They do it for almost every patient suspected to be suffering from meningitis or other such infections that can be picked up through gram staining and other tedious micro tests. It's almost surreal, how differently the doctors operate over here.

One of the girls told me she had to watch a CSF sample being taken from a baby; they bent over its back and stuck the needle into its spinal cord while it screamed the place down. She had to walk out. I cringed just hearing it. Suffice to say it was some reality check.

In happier news, I've learnt some chichewa! Malawian language in simpler terms. I still have to try it out on some unsuspecting civilians though.

Ahhh it's hitting me that I'm already in my final week in the labs. I don't know where the time's gone. And despite my reservations about working in a lab for the rest of my life, I don't want to leave! Gotta love these guys for trying to convince me that lab life is the one. They wanted to take me out for lunch and all. Bless them. And whilst one of the guys lied to me saying that the dental department is closed next week in a last-ditch attempt to make me stay, he did reluctantly concede "you'll make a very good dentist; the best in fact."

Brownie points for having the faith in me I only wish I had.