IDEAL (More about cows)

So there is this study going on in Busia, right on the border with Uganda, and it is called IDEAL…Infectious Diseases of East African Livestock. Basically they recruited a cohort of about 550 calves at birth, paid the owners for the right to tell them how to raise the calves, told them not to dip them or treat them or anything, and visited them every 5 weeks or whenever they get sick. This study will form the basis of the data that I will use to create a diagnostic support tool because they gathered extensive information on clinical signs and attempted to diagnose every clinical episode in the life of every calf. The disease burden here is high, 16% of the calves died, with almost 90% of those deaths from infectious causes, and 60% of the infectious causes were East Coast Fever, the disease that I did my thesis on.

So today I traveled to Busia for the workshop and party celebrating the end of the field work, and to meet the people that I'll be working/living with in Edinburgh in January. After watching a bunch of cool presentations about what they've found so far in the study, we drove at breakneck speed to the farm where the last calf lives, to collect the last set of data! Actually, we didn't drive at breakneck speed because CDC cars have "governors" that use GPS to track the car, and notice and beep anytime the car goes over 80 km/hour, so we had some trouble keeping up with the ILRI vehicles that don't have speed restrictions. It was really cool to see them collecting the samples and examining the calf, since I adapted our collection protocols from theirs. Also, it was great to be in the field again! I am desperate to finish doing office-y things and get back out in the field actually playing with cows (and other animals).

I also met a really cool guy named Mark who is the District Veterinary Officer for one of the districts near Kakamega (north of Kisumu). He is super enthusiastic and is really interested in mobile technology and setting up animal health surveillance that can be done in real time instead of what they have now which is a system of reportable diseases and paper forms that are often faked and take months to travel to the central offices. So I hope hope that this spring I can try to expand my ADSARS (everything has to have an acronym…Animal Disease Surveillance and Response System) to his district, where it will be in the hands of local government, headed by an awesome DVO!

I want to post some pictures, but I think that will have to wait until tomorrow. Sorry.