mobile malaria project

Day 20/21: Lusaka (workshop)

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Thursday 11 April 2019 | Distance travelled: 0km

The day of the workshop. We arrived at the NMEC early and set up for the morning. There were around 20 people attending, from the NMEC, University of Zambia, teaching hospital,and the PATH lab that we had been working with.

Last night Jason had put on the first run of the MinION (sequencing machine) in Zambia. We arrived in the morning to see that it had been generating a ton of data all night. It had been an exceptionally good run, better than anything he'd done in Oxford, and so we started the workshop with renewed enthusiasm as well as a desire to talk to people about how we could use this technology with them.

We had a great morning of talks. I opened up with my mission statement talk - setting the scene for the project and highlighting the motivation behind it. Isaac followed and then Dr Busiku Hamainza, an epidemiologist at NMEC gave a really nice talk about Zambia's plans for elimination and the challenges they face.

We had a number of great conversations about future work. As with our Namibian colleagues, there has been nothing short of full positivity about the trip and our aims and it is nice to feel vindicated, yet again, about our message and our motivations.

In particular, I sat down with the self-defined 'senior malaria group'. Led by Jacob Chirma, this groups were very excited about our work and have a line into the permanent secretary for health, and therefore are reasonably powerful when it comes to decision making. They were very keen to take this forward and so were interested  to see how we could make future collaborations happen.