January
2009
Return to Tanzania: Medical Research Project1
Dear colleagues, friends and family,
It has been over two months since completing my service with the United States Peace Corps. To those of you I got to meet and reconnect with in Baltimore, Denver and Tampa during the month of December, it was truly a pleasure, though all too short. To those of you I did not get to see, I hope to be back in the states sometime in the Fall and again for all of December. Otherwise, Karibuni Tanzania!
Jessica and I are now back in Africa and busy transitioning from the cool, rainy southern highlands to the desert foothills of Central Tanzania. We are living in Kongwa, Dodoma and spending most of each day immersed in the work of the Kongwa Trachoma Project (KTP). A registered Tanzanian NGO in partnership with researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, KTP is the principal Tanzanian partner involved in the international Partnership for the Rapid Elimination of Trachoma (PRET).
A bacterium in the Chlamydia genus, C. trachomatis is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide and affects hundreds of millions of people. In conjunction with the World Health Organization’s goal of fully controlling trachoma worldwide by the year 2020, KTP’s activities follow the SAFE guidelines to trachoma eradication: Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement. There are currently projects underway which screen at-risk populations for trachoma and implement mass treatment with Azithromycin for villages with 10%+ infectious rates (following international and national standards of treatment). My current project builds off of this work.
Since Azithromycin is known to be effective against a host of pathogens, the ancillary benefits of this drug against malaria, sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), acute respiratory infections (ARIs) and diarrheal diseases are being studied. My own work has involved training village health workers and their supervisors, who are conducting health-surveillance of our study population and providing community-based treatment. Now that training has finished, I am continuing to monitor the course of the data collection process and implementation of treatment regimens, both in the study villages and in the KTP offices in Kongwa.
As a historian of science and medicine, it has been a fascinating experience to be involved in a research project and to observe the factors that contribute to experimental design and implementation: scientific, historical, ethical and practical. As a former secondary school biology teacher in Tanzania, it has also been interesting to be involved in the pedagogical aspects of this work, explaining physiology and pharmacology as well as research values and methods to the village health assistants (the family, friends, neighbors and even participants in our study population) as well as to their supervisors, the direct care providers in the village setting.
On my recent visit to the US, I remember many of you expressing surprise at mine and Jessica’s intentions to remain in Tanzania for the foreseeable future. Certainly that goal is contingent on the continuing availability of challenging and meaningful work such as this. We have reason to be optimistic at our prospects, yet we are, of course, prudently planning for the next year and beyond. We are continuing to search for organizations and individuals interested in discovering Tanzania and in collaborating with Tanzanians. It is the Peace Corps’ goal to establish mutually beneficial relationships between Americans and host-country nationals. As former volunteers, both Jessica and I are committed to that goal and believe that friendship, communication and collaboration are the best forms of foreign policy. It was truly gratifying to hear from a good many of you that you followed this blog with interest. If I can ever be of assistance in connecting you with some part of this country and its truly amazing people, please do not hesitate to contact me: josh@joshualevens.com
Peace.