Goodbye Adolfo Lutz

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Today is my last day at work.

I have to admit, I am not entirely sad that today is my last day of work for my internship (but please do not misinterpret, I have loved my experience here in Brazil, just the project was a bit of a headache). This project, although I knew it would a lot of tedious work, there were many more speed bumps that I ran into than I expected.

For those of you who do not know what my project is, I will explain briefly. For the past year there has been a collaboration between three labs, Dr. Harrison’s of the University of Pittsburgh who is the primary investigator, Dr. Claudio Sacchi’s real time PCR laboratory at the Instituto Adolfo Lutz (IAL) and Dr. Ricardo Albernaz from Centro de Vigilância Epidemiológica (CVE). The project is testing the accuracy of a new method for diagnosing bacterial meningitis called real time PCR. This information is important because the current culture methods used to diagnose bacterial meningitis are not entirely accurate so improving diagnostic tools is much needed. Dr. Harrison is the one that I was connected with and who invited me to come to Brazil, Claudio and his laboratory does all the laboratory tests for the project and Ricardo’s responsibility is to gather the patient and hospital information. This patient/hospital information is important to obtain because that information will be used in future analyzes. I was primarily brought to Brazil to work on this project because Claudio has been working hard processing over a thousand cerebral spinal fluid and serum samples throughout this past year, but there was no patient information collected to match any of the samples. My job was to figure out which samples were missing information (almost all), go to the hospitals, gather the information and input it into Claudio’s database. Not a very sexy job, but the end result should be exciting. One part I did enjoy was the actual hospital visits. It gave me a chance to get out of the laboratory and see a different part of the city that I normally probably would not have the opportunity to see.

Thankfully, even with the speed bumps I was able to visit all of the hospitals and collect information on every patient that Claudio has in his database. Phew! Now time for a vacation. I am back off to Caraguatatuba for a long weekend of sitting in a hammock.

To change the subject completely, here are some pictures from another day that I took to go around the city more. The Sé Cathedral is a famous cathedral in São Paulo because it is considered to be the exact center of the entire city. Being that São Paulo is a historically catholic city; I thought it was kind of cool to see one of the most famous catholic churches in São Paulo.

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Photos

Instituto Adolfo Lutz
The building where I work. I am on the 11th floor

The square in front of Sé
complete with the crazy old man who was ranting and screaming at the people passing by

Comments

[Char]

what square isn't complete with a crazy old man?