Advertisement
Published: March 19th 2013
Edit Blog Post
IMG_0205
Sunset off Moho Caye Hello from Belize! I am one week away from coming home-it has gone so fast! Last weekend we stayed at Moho Caye-a private island 15 minutes off the coast of Punta Gorda, Belize. The island is tiny, with 8 or so cabanas and a lodge each with their own beachfront and the only land between them a small path. The resort was once an up and running 5 star resort. Our guide, Roberto, said that it was the sort of place that if you had to ask the price you couldn’t afford it. $15,000 for one week! Everything is made out of Rosewood and the long dining hall in the lodge seats 30 people. We had our guide Roberto, his sidekick, Andy and three 18 year old boys that now work for the manager of the place to cater to us all weekend. We went snorkeling, toured the Marine Reserve Tower, kayaked and had super fancy meals of fresh fish (that our group caught!) and fresh fruit served to us in a style that would make Martha Stewart proud. The highlight had to be when Roberto boated back to the mainland to pick up a Garifuna drum group for our enjoyment.
IMG_0210
Belikin, the only Belizean Beer They played for us for two hours!
Last week of work was much more leisurely. Because the other team was on overnight mobile, we had to hold down fort at the clinic. I have been really lucky to have consistent follow-up with the patient who had the finger fracture. He has returned every week since I’ve been here. It is frustrating because I know his outcome would have been much better if we could have sent him for surgery, but this week I got to make him a new splint that could transition him to physical therapy. My greatest concern is that he will punch someone else and my work will be all for naught 😊
This weekend we decided to lay low because we all had to work on Sunday. We participated in a “lice and scabies eradication program” for a nearby village, San Marcos. There is a public health student here that has been working on this project for months. There has been a large problem in many villages because kids will be treated for scabies, but their families will not go through treatment and they don’t complete all the necessary steps at home to rid
IMG_0212
Beth and I with the ocean behind us! the house of scabies. The villagers continue to pass scabies back and forth and it has been a frustrating thing for the villages and our clinic. Part of the trouble stems from the lack of resources; it is much harder to tell people how to get rid of scabies when you can’t tell them “put it in the dryer on high heat”. To treat scabies in the US, Ivermectin is used as an oral treatment. This treatment is very effective, but can’t be used for kids less than 15.5 kg (34 pounds). This leaves the topical treatment of Permethrin. Permethrin 5% is the recommended treatment, but this strength is expensive and hard to come by here. Instead, we use Permethrin 1% which is the indicated treatment for lice. Confusing, yes? There have been several studies that have showed that community-wide eradication resulted in a 89% + reduction in lice and scabies diagnoses for up to 1-2 years. Hopefully this will ultimately decrease the amount of medication Hillside has to purchase/have donated.
We headed to San Marcos early in the am and each had our teams and our assigned jobs. My job was “Community Educator” as well as “Baby permethrin
IMG_0228
View from the porch of my cabana applier”. Basically, my job was to introduce our team, tell the families why we are there and explain to them what lice and scabies are and how it is spread. We then weigh each and every family member, determine the dosage of medication and administer the meds right there. We explained to the families the need for washing all of their laundry/hammocks in hot water. The babies who were too small for the meds got permethrin lotion applied all over their bodies. That’s where my second role came in! I fell in love with a little boy who was happy to have a bath of permethrin-such a sweet little kid.
We traipsed from house to house throughout the village. We had to backtrack several times because the village has four churches that all convene at different times. The services last up to two hours so families were gone for long periods of time. Many of the families had 8-11 people so we certainly had our work cut out for us. At the end of the (long) day, our clinic treated 639 people for lice and scabies-either for active infection or prophylaxis. Hopefully our efforts will lead to a complete
IMG_0231
The cabana eradication of lice and scabies in this village.
On top of our clinic duties we also have presentation duties. Yesterday our group presented on Tropical Diseases such as Malaria, Leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and Dengue fever. I left the presentation convinced that I have all four.
Yesterday after our clinic hours we went to do home visits. The Belize Ministry of Health does not include care for homebound patients and a big part of the hillside role is to provide care to patients that cannot leave home. A lot of the homecare is done in conjunction with the nuns from the convent down the road as part of a program called “HOPE: Helping Older People Equally”. Today we saw a patient who was completely blind due to uncontrolled diabetes and a 20-something patient that had a permanent tracheotomy and was wheelchair bound. He went to the US last year for several surgeries that have changed his life drastically. It is wonderful to be able to provide these patients with care that they would otherwise not have access to.
I have two more mobile clinics this week and will be spending a morning in the Prenatal Polyclinic. On Wednesday
IMG_0235
Perfectly situated hammocks we will be presenting to a group of elderly about medication compliance. I am hoping my patient with the fracture will return for his last splint reapplication. This week should be a busy one!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.098s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.06s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb