So easy to let days get away from you on trips like this, when they all sort of blend into one after a few weeks. I’m always amazed that bloggers can find time – and internet access – to update their websites every day on trips. I’m lucky if I can get to it once a week, between 17 hours days and days on end with no e-mail access.
Feel I’m in the home stretch now on this trip. Wrapped up a week with the CDC Foundation today, doing captions and stories. It’s my first time working with them and they are a pretty remarkable organization. Spent all week with Center for Disease Control staff here in Kenya, seeing how they monitor potential disease outbreaks. I always wondered. It is, in short, much more hands on than I imagined. In Kibera, the big settlement just outside Nairobi I wrote of earlier, they have 27 community interviewers who spend 5 days a week, sometimes more, going house to house in their areas, interviewing and tracking the dame families for years. They do this every single week, asking the same questions to fid out if anyone in the house is sick, or if anyone has gone to the clinic in the previous week. All of that information gets entered into a larger database so that CDC staff, and the Ministry of Health here in Kenya, can monitor any potential outbreaks, like cholera, that would quickly work it’s way through a densely-packed area like Kibera. It’s good to know there are people out there checking on that stuff. And they are a smart bunch.
September 6th, 2009 | by David in Travel
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