Hello—
Last Monday I went to Point G and “shadowed” Dr. Diallo (so handsome! Haha.) I sat with him in his office as he saw patients for the morning. He’s definitely got a mix of visits. The next day I went back and rounded on the TB floor with the medical students and Dr. Patrice. He’s wonderful, does research (Ousmane is his ultimate boss) on HIV and TB and is looking at cytokine levels at different time points. His English is great, and he was very nice to make sure to explain the important points of each patient to me. In fact, if I was ever out of sight all of a sudden I would hear “Where’s Bin-Tu?” He heads the TB rounds to keep up with clinical medicine. I think he’s a great person to have be connected with GAIA, because he’s a little less busy than the big wigs, he’s much more accessible and willing to help. He spent over two hours with me a few days later looking over the TB curriculum suggesting small but helpful changes (i.e people in Mali don’t know what stress is, therefore they won’t really understand that its connected to active TB, haha.)
Another day at Point G, I was scheduled to shadow to Dr. Patrice, but he was doing informed consent interviews for his research, so I kind of just roamed the halls until somebody picked me up, haha. Low and behold, not much time passed before I heard, “Bin-tu!” and this great doctor, Dr. Tolaba took me to his office. He heads the rounds for the non-TB pulmonary patients, I’m pretty sure he’s a specialist, definitely higher on the hierarchy than Dr. Patrice. Anyway I sat as he saw patients and he did his best to explain some things to me. I’ll send his contact info as well. (he gives me a fresh boisson from his mini-fridge every time I’m at the hospital! Haha.)
Yesterday I also went to Point G and rounded with the med students and Dr. Patrice again. The second time around I was able to follow it a bit more, and this very nice med student from Cameroon (great English) also helped to explain some things that were happening. They have a lot of interesting cases, there are about 28 patients, I know of 2 MDR cases and 1 XDR case, there was also two cases of Potts Disease and two other patients with co TB/Diabetes. I was only made aware of 1 patient with co HIV/TB, but I could have missed another one. Learned a bit about the treatment for MDR TB, and that to do the MDR test they have to send the culture to the faculty of sciences, and it takes about six weeks-two months to get the results back. & I’m pretty sure he said that for XDR cases they have to send cultures to Colorado?! Since it was my second time, I got in on the questions, as in “Bin Tu how many months of treatment for MDR?” 21!
Other than these Point G visits I’ve been working on the protocol with Sophie, which we handed in today for Dr. Flabou to take a look at before the Committee meets on Saturday. It was helpful to go through the protocol step by step, because it helped to organize the course of the pilot program in our minds and also helped to identify factors that we may need to better explain to the peer educators — i.e what is the course of a TB patient through the Sikoro health system, where are tests available, where are meds available, who administers meds, etc.
Also last Friday the 4th, sophie karamoko and I met with all the peer educators again about TB Bolo. Unfortunately about five of them were missing due to the rain, but those that were there were interested/attentive. we delved a bit deeper into the hard to grasp topics, ie. mdr, how to act when a person has tb, etc. sophie and I found a great website with comprehensive and easy to understand TB information in French, so we printed some of it and handed it out to the peer educators as a “booklet” they can keep it on hand when they go out into the community to do sensitization sessions. we were excited about that! anyway, we’ve been having a good time here. unfortunately dr. Patrice is leaving this friday for a month long vacation in southern mali. I’m not sure how best to proceed with the point g visits, bc dr. diallo is pretty busy dont want to get in the way much, but was thinking if i could get in with the med student from cameroon i could hang with her. also annie, how do I get in touch with the hiv docs? also once the protocol is approved, we’re going to proceed with training the five TB BOLO peer educators (karamoko will do a session to make sure they can do it in bambara, and we will also meet with salimata from the asacomsi and hope that she will be able to talk withthem about the TB process.) we will also meet with the tb people at the ces ref, dr. berte, etc. to keep them up to date with whats happening.
Cool,
Binny