Day 17: Way to Walewale

Tuesday - August 24, 2021

The plan for Tuesday was to split up our team (Josh and Spencer were heartbroken). So Janis and I started off the morning by getting checked out of our room in Tamale. We showed up at the PMI office at 10 to leave, but we got an extra treat and headed in to watch our collaborator, Louisa, go through the ELISA process. ELISA is used to determine if a mosquito is infectious by looking for sporozoites in the head and thorax. Since infectivity is an important factor in malaria control, this part of the process is really important. In order to try to help, Spencer, Janis, and I spent the beginning of the day hand labeling at least 500 Eppendorf tubes. Louisa says she normally does all of that herself! She then took us through the process of cutting up the mosquitoes, grinding them, and getting all of the solutions ready to do the fluorescent reading. The other half of the team came in around this time and finished up observing the process so we could leave to Walewale.

After a great lunch, we started the drive up to Walewale, which is about an hour and a half from Tamale. We started off the drive with some fun conversations and ended with simple observations of the surroundings. It was a beautiful drive, but, unsurprisingly, Janis missed most of it because she was asleep!

Once we got to Tamale, we got checked into our hotel, the Nii Dentis. Having mechanical keys in a hotel was actually a bit of a shock to me, I‘m so used to swiping into rooms! Janis and I had been expecting to share a room, but when we got here and mentioned that, they laughed at us… To be fair, the beds are definitely big enough to share! We did end up taking our separate rooms though. The hotel has a beautiful courtyard, so we decided to sit outside and talk while waiting for our main collaborator, Sylvestor, to join us to head into the community.

We drove just a couple minutes down the road to the Kata/Banawa community. This is one of the locations where PMI does collection every month, and it is also a community that receives IRS intervention. Just in case we haven’t explain IRS before, it stands for Indoor Residual Spray and is one of the most widespread malaria control interventions. It essentially involves spraying insecticide on any structure where humans live in order to kill the mosquitos the bite humans. It’s been shown to be pretty effective in reducing malaria! They weren’t doing spraying here tonight though, tonight was about data collection for surveillance. So we went in to observe human landing catchers (HLCs) - which I believe Spencer has already described - and a CDC light trap. We talked to the HLCs and saw how they catch the mosquitos - PMI uses a different technique than Uganda that seemed to be super effective - and were able to ask a ton of questions about mosquito behavior and collection techniques. We are returning in the morning to this community in order to see the results of all of the collection!

- Summer