Following an earlier posting regarding Brucellosis, a relatively common disease that we encounter within our community in Uganda, I realised that having looked through the list of diseases that can be dealt with by this or that protocol, I noticed that there are diseases that we have to deal with here in Africa, that have not yet been noted due to the fact that very few people, if any have been in a position to treat them, other than Malaria, of course and the work that JH himself has done with HIV etc.
One such example is Typhoid. When working over in Ethiopia a couple of years back, two thirds of the team that I was with succumbed to it in quick succession; so, both out of curiosity, and the desire to educate myself in regards to which Protocols could be administered in specific instances, I would appreciate any feedback in regards to what we should use if we encounter it in future.
We have a dairy farm predominately stocked with Ankole cows in the south west of Uganda, and being the only white man within a radius of about 35Kms, I am seen as something of a celebrity. Being community minded, we do help out wherever and whenever we can, but our main efforts to date has been supporting our community hospital, which when compared to western standards can only be described as a small run down clinic with a handful of aging, dilapidated beds.
Due to the lack of funding, medicines are sometimes not available, which then requires the sick people to have to endure a costly and often uncomfortable trip along pot-holed roads to another clinic in the hope that it might have the medicines that they need.
Having recently become qualified as a Health Minister, I will be returning to Uganda armed with the knowledge and the ability to bring health to the sick and diseased within our community and quite likely well beyond.
I will be posting results and testimonies of our experiences and will from time to time be requesting for advice whenever we are confronted with anything that has yet to be documented here at the G2C forum.