Hi everyone! Hope you are having a wonderful summer so far! Sara and I have been super busy getting ready for our trip, among all the other things you can catch up on while not in school. For those of you who don't know, I'm a German scholar, and the only Spanish I knew before this year was what I learned from living with my crazy and beloved college roommate. I was being really good at first about staying on top of reading the medical Spanish book, but summer laziness has taken over in the past week, and I really need to get on that again.
Another thing we have been running around like crazy trying to do is get approval for our research study. For those of you who don't know yet, we are doing our Medical Student Research (MSR) projects in Bolivia this summer. Because this is an international project, we need approval from both the Institutional Review Board at our university, as well as in-country approval from officials in Bolivia, so there is a lot of red tape to cut through. We are cutting it down to the wire to get approved before we leave.
Many of you have asked how we got the idea for our project. Since both Sara and I are interested in engineering (she was an engineer in college and I have always loved engineering), we knew we wanted to do something engineering-, as well as health-related. First off, we chose Bolivia because our adviser, Dr. Wilson in the Department of Epidemiology, is good friends with Sue, a nurse from Hershey who works there full-time now, and was happy to host us in her clinics there. Some members of Sue's team also happened to be part of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), and have been conducting heavy metals research in mining regions of Bolivia.
The idea of our project is to offer a health perspective to the studies being conducted by EWB. It has been shown that irrigation of crops with contaminated water from mine run-off can yield crops with elevated concentrations of heavy metals. Since 60% of the Bolivian diet is attributed to potato consumption, we will be collecting potato samples from both mining and non-mining regions that we travel to, for analysis of heavy metal content. We will also be administering health surveys to determine if there is a difference in health outcomes of Bolivians in mining and non-mining regions. In particular, we are looking to find a correlation between elevated exposure to heavy metals in the diet, and health conditions that are known to result from heavy metal toxicity, such as hypertension and renal dysfunction.
I am home in Michigan until we leave on Thursday, but Sara is back in Hershey for the week collecting all of the donations the medical center community has generously given us to take to the clinics. Thanks to your help, we have reached our goal of raising $300 to purchase reading glasses and sunglasses to donate to the clinics! I have purchased 1 case of each, and filled nearly an entire suitcase with these. Thank you everyone for your contribution!
Finally, here is an approximate schedule for our trip. The exact dates are a little fuzzy, but it will give you some idea of where we will be. If you happen to be in the area, we would love to see you!
Trip Itinerary
June 4-5: Miami
June 5: La Paz
June 5-12: Rurrenabaque (Rio Colorado)
June 12-21: La Paz (El Alto)
June 21-27: Cochabamba (Cotani)
June 28: La Paz
June 29-July 3: Potosi
July 4-11: La Paz
July 11-14: Miami
July 14: Home
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