So yes, it has been ages since I last wrote. Partly due to exhaustion after our week away. We arrived back in Moshi on Sunday night, sadly other groups got stuck in the mud and had to be shipped out by boat and then local bus. Proving how hard access to anything is, when you don’t have surfaced roads.

On return, half of our week was spent preparing our verbal presentation and finalising the written report, a picture of which i’ve put online (all 116 pages of it).

The rest of the week was spent on malaria teaching, and it was pretty shocking. This one illness doesn’t kill for the obvious reasons, and it doesn’t target the obvious groups. The take home message from Dr Baz Nadjm and Dr Tom Doherty, was that it kills children, mainly under twos. And if you make it past that age, whilst you may well get severe malaria later, you are less likely to die from it. The other sad fact was that the reason most people die is that they just do not get to healthcare facilities in time. There is a lot of malaria that is never seen because people die in the community. We estimate approximately 2000 lives a day, yes, a day, are lost to it.

Finally, our other take home message was that we are massively overdiagnosing malaria without testing people first – and missing other important killers as a result. In my study group at Pangani, we found that four out of five people who were treated for malaria we not even tested, and may well have had other problems. And of those who were lucky enough to be tested, in whom malaria was suspected, half of them didn’t have it either.

Lots of food for thought there – if you want to know more, you can read our report!

As for the weekend, well a rather lively night at the “Glacier”, sprinkled with generous amounts of Konyagi, led to a ceilidh on the roof of our hotel, and sore heads the day after.

Sunday however was incredible. I saw giraffes. Wow.