THE KNIGHTS HAVE ARRIVED

This week was pretty awesome. The Geneseo Knights arrived on campus for one heck of a week. Monday I joined the crew for some lab safety training while also using microscopy to test for shedding snails (cercaria). Tuesday we were able to head to the field and try to find more snail. This seemed to be the most successful day for snail collection thus far. We were able to find a few hundred compared to the nine in total we found the previous time. We also met up with some of the school members as well as administer the education aspect my project partially involves, because it deals with the health of the children. Wednesday we came back to the field again, this time testing for schisto, both S. haemotobium and S. mansoni. This was done by taking stool and urine samples from the individuals in the school. Thursday we were in the lab all day. The Geneseo students were taking care of some kato-katz, which allowed to see the fecal form of the schistosome, S. mansoni. While this was going on, I starting analyzing urine samples as well s taking care of the stuff for my experiment. We needed to find snails shedding cercaria for the next phase; around this time of year only about 5 percent of snails actually shed, which is sorta tricky. Some lab assistants and I were able to find about 8 snails shedding in total which I guess will be enough to start the trial on Monday! Today we went back to the field. We did malaria testing, health education as well as some nicey-nice soccer games! *excuse me the proper term is football. With a toal of alomst 90 hours of work put in this far this week I think its time to sign off and get relaxing!