August 10 - UWOCASO, MakSPH, and Dinner with Malaria-focused Colleagues

On this day we went back to Mulago Pathology to continue our dry run of the IRB protocol, visited Madame Gertrude at UWOCASO and Dr. Peter Waiswa at Makerere School of Public Health with the graduate team, and ended the day with dinner with our colleagues on the VectorCam team and their Ministry of Health collaborators.

We headed back to Mulago Pathology lab early in the morning and continued our scanning dry-run with Boaz, Matovu, and Dr. Veronica. We spent the morning doing a good bit of troubleshooting but made progress.

We then met the graduate team at the Uganda Women's Cancer Support Organization headquarters where the team got to understand challenges in the breast cancer pathway from Madame Gertrude, CEO of UWOCASO and a breast cancer survivor herself. Kim Hwang and I met her back in January (blog post here: "Pink Sneakers and Ultrasound Sweeps"). In addition to the graduate team's questions, we gained a few insights relevant to EKYAALO:

• Q: What do you believe, from the women you serve/your own experience, is the perception of a fine needle aspiration procedure?

  • Like needle pricking. Not bad. What people fear is the excision/removal.

• Q: Currently in rural communities, the pathway to diagnosis is long. One of the reasons being that the diagnostic services are not available/close to where women live. What do you think will change if this service is offered near where they live?

  • People will like it because there is no need for referrals. The bad part for lots of women is the referral process. This can be convoluted, lead to dead-ends, and unproductive.

• Q: What is the perception of AI in the village/community level?

  • Perception of AI to diagnose is positive. Modernization is present now. Some village health centers and VHTs have smartphones too.

From UWOCASO, we headed to the Makerere School of Public Health to meet with Dr. Peter Waiswa, a huge presence in the world of maternal and newborn health and health systems strengthening in Uganda and longtime collaborator with our team and CBID.

We ended the day meeting with our graduate program director at CBID, who just got to Uganda to support a pilot study for a malaria vector surveillance tool called VectorCam. We joined him and some of the VectorCam team at dinner. It was good to understand the Ministry's support of a project like VectorCam and the planning period of an in-country pilot.