A couple days at the ICDDR,B

Our third day in Dhaka is wrapping up. It’s been a great trip so far, and it has been pretty productive as far as our project goes. The ICDDR,B is the research institution where Maia has been working for the past couple years, and where the three of us have been working for the past couple days, and where we will probably work for much of the trip. They run several hospitals across the country but their primary work takes place here in Dhaka where they treat diarrheal disease. They were the organization that actually pioneered oral rehydration solution (ORS) which is still today one of the major treatments for diarrheal disease.

Their campus is housed at a location called the institute for public health which also houses a number of other hospitals and research groups. It is in a different part of the city from where we are staying. While it is not too far away as the crow flies (I’ve always wanted to use that saying!) it can take 45 to 90 minutes to get there due to the traffic. Today was not as bad as yesterday, but there were moments when we were stuck in standstill traffic for quite some time. One of the many complications of commuting in a megacity.

The campus of the ICDDR,B has several different buildings, with the largest being about 5-6 stories tall where most of the labs and offices are. The institute provides clinical services, and also has many labs that work on different microbiological studies. One of the buildings has the library where we have been going when not meeting with people. It is a nice space that is air-conditioned with very fast internet, though there is a filter that prevents you from going to facebook on the network, or doing anything not so work related. The library is also filled with tons of print medical journals from mainstream ones such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, to more obscure journals such as the Iranian Medical Journal ofInfectious Disease.

Yesterday we met with Dr. Pitroni who is the institute’s medical director. He directed us to a number of different people we can talk to to help us with our project. He has helped advise Maia some over the past couple years, and he was eager to support us by giving us advice on our project. One thing he warned us of however was that as with many universities and research institutions, we need to work our way through a lot of hierarchy and politics in order to get things done, but I think we are up to the task.

Today we met with a man whom Dr. Pitroni had recommended we speak to. His name is Dr. Siraj Islam, and he has been working with cholera for over 30 years. I felt bad because he wa ssick and planning on taking the day off, but decided to come in just so he could meet with us. He has done a lot of work linking the spread of cholera in Bangladesh to blue-green algae blooms in the Bay of Bengal, which is now one of the most important concepts in current cholera tracking in the country. He has also developed a compound that can be used to eliminate cholera from water that is safe to consume. The compound is undergoing more extensive trials now, but seems to have a lot of potential for cholera prevention. After explaining our project, Dr. Siraj became interested in the idea of tracking the spread on a larger scale which has not really been done before. He offered up his expertise on the environmental factors that help cholera transmission and has offered to give us access to the dozens of journal articles that he has written. He also boasted (a well deserved boast) of the over 32 million dollars he has raised over the years in grant writing that he may be able to offer his wisdom on. He even offered to come with us to Matlab (a region a few hours away from Dhaka that we are going to for a couple days) next week to show us first hand some of the work that is going on there.

The past two days have been productive, and this productivity will hopefully continue. Tomorrow we have a meeting at the Dutch Embassy with their head of development in Bangladesh that Kate’s father was able to put us in touch with. It should be a neat experience.

Also, people have been asking for pictures. /Well, I don't really have any, except for this one that was a struggle to take today. It was quite sunny out and we could not stop ourselves from squinting. It looks a bit darker because we had to change the colors around to make it look better.