Vacunas, Consultas, y Las Aldeas

This past week the doctors from Centro de Salud invited us to join them on a trip to surrounding towns in the mountains (aldeas) to offer medical consults (consultas), prescription medications, and vaccinations (vacunas) to those in need. Four teams departed around 8:00 AM, seated in the back of pick-ups, equipped with coolers filled with vaccinations, boxes of antibiotics and anti-parasite meds, as well as stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and oto/ophthalmoscpoes. Lindsay and I joined two of the teams and headed south to the small towns of Chilar and Boca de Monte, where our teams saw greater than 100 patients during the morning with only two physicians. The majority of the patients had parasites, and almost every child had scabies, and there were plenty of patients with "gripe" (common cold). A few of the children also had congenital deformities.

The trip was an invaluable opportunity to partner with the lcoal physicians and to learn from them more about the characteristic physical exam findings associated with the bread-and-butter diseases prevalent here. Chagas disease, which is endemic to many parts of Central America, is transmitted by parasites that live in the excrement of a small beetle - the reduvid - that lives in thatch roofs. Sadly, there is no cure for the disease, and there are towns nearby in which the entire populace in infected. However, we also saw how foreign countries have donated supplies to help a government-run program to replace all thatch roofs in Honduras with metal roofing. This program is by no means complete, but it is encouraging to see the global effort that is underway to prevent the spread of this disease. I actually spotted four reduvids that dropped on me during our consults, and as a result, the physicians are organizing a team to return to Boca de Monte to speciate the reduvids to see of they are the same ones that transmit Chagas.
Overall, it was an incredible experience. We learned a great deal from both the patients and the physicians, and our Spanish continues to improve.

Our time in Copan is quickly coming to and end. We leave Saturday for La Ceiba - a costal town in the north of Honduras. There we plan to focus more on medical vocabulary and hope to volunteer with the Honduran Red Cross.