Yeah, little or no posting yesterday. Busy! I spent most of the day meeting on Global Health issues or doing the yeoman’s work of entering shovel probe data. I’m assisting on research at my old/new/future place of employment with the Coptic Center. I worked with them on their data for the HIV-related stuff a couple times over the last couple of years, but now I’m starting to assist more with the research end. Here at the UW they primarily work with the HIV part of the clinic which interests me only mildly, but once I get back from Egypt I’ll be starting to work with their TB data more. TB is interesting because it’s been around forEVER and has had a large impact on the health of human societies since we started living in close proximity to one another. There’s some evidence that a 16th century epidemic of TB in Europe essentially rid the continent of leprosy and there’s also been some work done on the relation of TB to the 1918 influenza pandemic such that many of the people who died of the flu were already weakened by TB infection. The co-immunity idea of the former makes some sense since they’re related at the genus level (Mycobacterium), though it’s not quite that straightforward.
At any rate, I like the idea that this project is through something ‘Coptic’ and yes, it’s that Coptic. I met the director, Fr. Mena, who is actually a North American by birth. So we’ll see; much work but I like it.
