Day 6: Live Bait

Friday 13 August

Another 6:30-er today! I forgot to mention this, but in the evening yesterday we went out to another village called Awoja to set more traps in hopes of a good harvest for our mosquito library. It seemed pretty promising – the mosquitos were already coming out when we were setting things up. When we went to collect those traps this morning, they were FULL. I’m talking 500+ mosquitos in the traps alone. We also performed further PSC at ten huts. All in all I bet we came home with well over 1500 specimens, much more than we could have hoped for after yesterday’s harvest.

I had a few words with the VHT at Awoja. We talked about thatch and the beauty of his village and what he calls their “simple life”. Another classic example of a servant leader. These volunteers are the kind of people I want to surround myself with for the rest of my life.

The remainder of the day we spent imaging mosquitos. The work we put into developing a system yesterday really paid off – at our peak performance the first day it was taking 2 people ~5 minutes to co-image a single specimen, and by the end of the day today I was imaging and packing a mosquito in less than 2 minutes. We were cranking out data for our algorithm at three stations personed by the VCOs and myself. The VCOs did not sign up to be taking cell phone photos of mosquitos for hours on end, but they really came through for us. I was impressed with their work ethic.

In an effort to make these new images available for a rapid re-training of our algorithm, the team back at Hopkins took it upon themselves to stay up ALL NIGHT cleaning and organizing the data. These guys are something else! One of the reasons I found this program so appealing is I knew it would attract some top-tier powerhouse people. I was not wrong. Our team is stacked with highly-trained killer ninja engineers. In the best way.

The exciting part of the day (in a morbid sort of way) was our opportunity to observe what are called Human Landing Catches or HLCs. See, the other trapping methods are interesting and efficient, but all they really tell us is whether there are mosquitos in a hut. One thing they leave unclear is whether the mosquitos are just hanging out there because it’s cozy, or because they intend to suck the blood of the occupants. What we’re ultimately interested in is whether the mosquitos are biting, or at least trying to bite, humans. Human Landing Catch is the test that best represents the mosquitos that are actually going after humans.

At night we returned to Awoja with some coffee cups lidded with tool (white mesh for those less familiar than me with fabrics of all kinds) and a rubber band. We took these cups – 12 for each site, one for each hour of the night – to the brave men who had volunteered as bait. We also brought them each a straw, yes, a giant straw made of rubber hose and glass tubing. You can just make it out in the terrible picture below. Their job is to sit in a chair for 4 hours with their pants rolled up to bring in the bugs. When a mosquito lights on their calf, they are to suck it into the straw and then blow it into the appropriate cup through a hole in the mesh. The hole is then plugged with a cotton ball. This is repeated hundreds of times over the course of their 4-hour shift, then they wake the next person for their shift.

The bait people are paid 10,000 Ugandan Shillings, less than $3, for their efforts. They’re also given complimentary coffee and bread to fuel their work. Though the catchers are given prophylactic medications to decrease the likelihood of infection, this scene really epitomizes the drive of these people in the fight against Malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.