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Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India
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Sunday, July 10, 2011

Fixing leaks


Date: 07/10/2011


With my eyes scrunched up and my forehead crinkled, I listened like I had never listened before. The only thing I was aware of, apart from the drop of perspiration slipping slowly down my nose, was the beating of my patient’s heart in my ears. I moved the stethoscope to a different location to confirm my belief that there were no abnormal S3 or S4 sounds. A drop of perspiration fell from my the tip of my nose to the cement floor. I was tempted to take a break and wash my face at the tap outside.
Leaky tap outside the screening venue....fitting imagery for our global health situation?

We were in the midst of another community health screening. Our goal was to provide TLC to the population of the village and draw blood samples to test for the prevalence of Celiac disease in the community. This information is vital to avert an impending epidemic of the disease in India. We were planning to do screenings in two different villages and were expecting about 400 people to come by and ended up being overwhelmed with 500 attendees whom we saw over a course of 10 hours. Kartik, Gemlyn, and I were working as the medical officers. Our work was to quickly elicit a history and prescribe simple medicines ranging from multivitamins to famotidine (an H2 inhibitor to reduce excessive stomach acid production) to ameliorate their suffering. We also referred them to specialists when we realized that we were out of our depth. Suresh and Shrikanth were drawing blood samples, Bala was directing the whole show. Vettri was measuring heights, John and Murugan were drawing in the crowds, and Gowri was helping me with the translations.
Bala being a dynamic leader as usual



You can see how crowded it was getting.


My stethoscope had been repositioned and I was about to re-scrunch my eyes when I noticed the lady’s son staring at me. My eyes scanned his tiny body. I took in his bare feet and his hair which glistened with the coconut oil his mother had put in lovingly. His shirt was buttoned in two places and held in another place by a safety pin. It was only then that I noticed how his shirt was stretching over his distended belly. After another few crinkled and scrunched up seconds, I determined that his mother didn’t have any obviously abnormal heart sounds. She turned to go, but I took the moment to swoop down on the kid. A quick unbuttoning (and un-safety-pin-ing) later, my suspicion was confirmed-- his belly was distended and his limbs were stick thin, a sign of protein energy malnutrition (PEM). With Gowri  translating rapidly, I immediately counseled the mother on the child’s nutrition and gave him a deworming pill (Albendazole, single dose) for good measure. His brother turned out to have the same problem. Fixing PEM early in childhood has been shown to increase the income and productivity of individuals. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo remind us that Kenyan children who were dewormed for two years earned 20% more than children in schools of equal quality who were only dewormed for one year.  I was immensely pleased to have a crack at this high yield intervention. 
A little girl in the next village. Her prominent pot-belly and stick thin limbs helped me diagnose her protein energy malnutrition from across the street.

A few minutes later, I cautiously pulled a young man’s eyelids down to check for pallor in his conjunctiva which, if present, is indicative of anaemia. I felt my shirt being pulled out of my Jeans. With some irritation, I wheeled around to face the scoundrel perpetrating this sartorial outrage on me. I came face to face with a fourteen month old girl with big brown eyes and half open mouth in her mother’s arms. My irritation morphed into a smile as I greeted the little girl. However, within a few seconds, it was apparent that she too suffered from PEM. My mentor, Dr. Guerrant, had demonstrated that the window of opportunity to do something about malnutrition and the subsequent stunting ended at 2 years. She was 14 months old! I still had the time to fix her trajectory of growth! I did so with great gusto and optimism. Over the course of the day, I did this again and again. Interestingly, many of the parents hadn’t brought the children to be checked and I only caught them because I was looking for signs of malnutrition in the kids. 

This is the sight that greeted me when I spun around in irritation.

Handing the baby back to the mother after inspecting her.



I know I often write very dejectedly and bitterly about global health issues. Even today, I met people I could do nothing for like a gentleman and a lady with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). For them, it’s de facto a death sentence because they don’t have the economic means to secure treatment and the public health system is too overwhelmed to subsidize it for them. I see the global health issues our world faces as similar to the leaky tap in some respects. Bit by bit, we lose human capital to stupid and preventable conditions like malnutrition and malaria. It may not seem like a lot, but the drops and the lives being wasted both add up to a burden the world can ill afford. By helping those little children today, I feel I plugged the leak on a nano-scale and I don’t see why we can’t do it on an infinitely larger scale. 

He had severe COPD. I heard the wheezing through my steth and asked Gemlyn to confirm the diagnosis. We couldn't do anything for this poor fellow. He simply cannot afford the Rs. 10000 per month ($750 USD PPP) that are required for the best treatment. Still, sometimes it's important to focus on the good we can do as well as the areas where we feel helpless.



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