bun cha!

Today was a fantastic and enlightening day. We had an hour of Public Health History which pertained to Dengue Fever and what Vietnam is doing about it. I always knew that mosquitoes are the vector for Dengue and that Dengue is more prevalent in tropical areas. Today, I learned why that it: A mosquito's life cycle is dependent on the temperature and humidity of the air. The hotter it is, the more rapid the mosquito's life cycle. In tropical areas with high humidity, mosquitoes have a life cycle of about five days, which means that they reproduce much more quickly and more mosquitoes are introduced into the environment on a daily basis making it harder to control their population. Popular methods for controlling the mosquito population are predatory species (mesocyclops-look it up), chemical spraying and genetic modification. The chemical spraying took me back to my New Orleans days. I can remember the trucks rolling down the road emitting huge clouds of chemicals as I was playing outside and booking it inside to avoid whatever it was they were spraying. I also remember our neighbor saying that when he was a kid, they would all get on their bikes as the truck rolled by and try to keep up with the truck.

We toured the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology to get a more first-hand look as what's being done about Dengue Fever. We got to tour a lab where mosquitoes were being bread for research. We saw them as eggs, larvae, pupae and adults. The adults were separated by gender (don't ask me how to tell the difference) and kept in netted boxes. For the first time in my life, the mosquitoes were the ones encapsulated in a net and I was on the outside. For every morning at camp when I killed a mosquito bulging with my blood which it had been happily sucking all night, I hope that one of those mosquitoes in the netted box was terrified by my presence and knew how easily I could crush it. The genetically engineered mosquitoes were those of the male population. They produced offspring that would not make it past the pupae stage. I didn't know we could do that to mosquitoes, but TAKE THAT!

Lunch was Bun Cha. I don't know if I spelled that right, but I do know that I've eaten it before and that it's delicious. I think I've written about it before, but, in case you are just tuning in, it is a sweet broth with chunks of papaya, rice noodles, slices of pork, pork meatballs and various greens. It seems that no matter what food we are eating on the streets, it is accompanied by a plate of greens: lettuce, bean sprouts, some grass-looking green, mint, and a purple leaf with a strong flavor.

The afternoon was spent in a class that, while fascinating, did not present much information that I didn't know about HIV/AIDS. One of the coolest parts was getting to brainstorm in groups about how to make antiretrovirals (ARVs) more widely accessible and ensure that patients continued to seek health services and take their medications. Some solutions included social marketing campaigns to eliminate social stigma, a system of referrals and accountability for local clinics to keep track of patients, and a reworking of international policies such as TRIPS (an intellectual property protection law from the WTO which applies to pharmaceutical companies among others) in order to produce more medications in the countries that need them, just to name a few.

I can honestly own the fact that I crave Bubble Tea from the shop across the street and peanuts from the school's canteen on a regular basis.