Going To Bangladesh?

A new twist of events has occurred and I am headed to Bangladesh in 2008/09 to complete a substantial part of my dissertation research. NIH funds the project and the team includes professors and students at Columbia University, University of North Carolina, University of Tennessee and the University of Dhaka. I am writing this entry to provide some background into why I am going and what I will be doing there.

Over the last 35 years, much work has been done by non-profit organizations installing about 10 million tube wells in rural Bangladesh to provide clean drinking water for many of the ~140 million people in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Tragically, it was realized in the mid 1980’s that the shallow groundwater was slowly poisoning millions of people with very high levels of Arsenic (sometimes many times over the WHO drinking water guideline of 10 mg/L). Exacerbating this tragedy, although these wells were originally installed to limit people’s contact with waterborne pathogens, so prevalent in surface water, the rate of diarrheal disease remain very high resulting in much illness and high infant mortality.

This is where our team comes in. The rationale behind our approach requires some background to grasp, and if you ever want an earful, give me a call, but the short version is, there is preliminary evidence suggesting changes in shallow geology is a chief factor in determining the concentrations of pathogens in the groundwater. There is also evidence suggesting that where pathogens are present, arsenic is absent (i.e. they are negatively correlated). If this is true, then encouraging villagers to switch from high arsenic wells to low may have been pushing them from one type of disease to another. If our team can establish a general relationship between arsenic and pathogens, these findings may motivate non-profit organizations and the Bangladeshi Government to drill deeper wells. Treatment is also an option, but to date this has proved to be high maintenance and/or costly.

The idea that geology determines the microbiological quality of groundwater is not new. What is new is that the quantitative understanding of the link between geology and waterborne disease, may be readily applied to the over 50 million Americans (as well as billions of people all over the world) that rely on untreated groundwater for their drinking water.

Plans are still being made, but the rough work plan is for me to go over during the dry season (January/08) and wet season (October/08) and likely another trip in 2009.

I’m so excited!!! For non-science people this is like winning the lottery to me, getting to work within a multi-university, multi-national team filled with world leaders in their fields of study.

And because I wouldn’t be being sufficiently transparent with my readers if I didn’t say this, I’m very thankful to God for this as well. Remember me in your prayers. Culture Shock 301 here we come!

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Cheers to Family, to the East Coast, to Nova Scotia, to Canada and a great Canadian Beer Alexander Keiths

At the Airport

I didn't tell my sister that Anna was listening to Black Eyed Peas at this moment

At the Cottage (Lakehouse)

Caleb

Esther

Rachel who's in Love with George Washington

Full throttle Anna

Lawrencetown Beach. I love this place!

Going out for dinner.

Halifax Pier

Brother-in-law Dwight

Cowabunga Dude! Surfing in the North Atlantic in August. I think I saw frozen fish floating by.

Sailboats moored along the Halifax Pier

View of downtown Halifax from the Toll Bridge...grrrr!

Going over the MacDonald Toll Bridge. Blast that toll! 60 cents gone forever!

Business District

Dalhousie Technical University

Modern Condos in Downtown Halifax

Spring Garden Road

Kristen and kids getting ice cream with Snowball the Beejan Friese

Waterloo Representin' on the East Side

Looking out the Halifax Harbour over the Atlantic Ocean

WWII Bunkers

Halifax Shipping Yards

Entrance to Point Pleasant Park

Crime and Punishment

Reading literature from different cultures and times sets us free from our present place allowing us to critically examine assumptions inherent in the culture we live in. I was reading Crime and Punishment when I noticed that present-day politicians (especially in the American South) try to convince everyone that each of them are more morally good than others, and upon this base their claim to leadership. Dosteovsky ignores all those ‘upright’ people and instead looks at humanity in its most naked form, exposed to sickness and poverty, and vulnerable. It’s like being in grad school for a prolonged period of time, no it’s worse than that because grad students generally have high expectations of the future. The majority of the world today lives much worse off, and has considerably more modest hopes for the future, and if they knew the statistics they wouldn’t even have that hope. Somehow those of us that have enough, forget, or never learned how life is when a choice must be made between starvation and crime (murder or stealing).

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

Late Saturday night I came back from ice skating and talked to my roommate Nick, briefly before going to bed. Soon after turning my light off and closing my eyes I awoke to a loud BANG outside my room. At first I thought Nick had got angry with his thesis and thrown a text book down, but the sound was too loud, so I got up to ask Nick what it was. He was also alarmed and thought I had rolled out of bed or hurt myself somehow doing some kind of strange bedtime yoga exercises. Since we were the only ones in the house, we set off to investigate what it could have been.

Earlier that day our neighbors had a garage sale and our street had a lot more traffic than usual. Although we live in a very upscale neighborhood with virtually no crime, our house lies above a ravine that is thick with foliage. So we walked around the house to investigate. Nick was armed with a baseball bat, I carried his small maglight shining it into the bushes and yelling out “we’ve called the cops and we’re packin, so ya better take off now”. After looking around the house for a while we went inside and looked around a little more. We found something very disturbing. In Nick’s room there is a trap door in his closet that leads to the attic. The trap door was open and insulation was scattered over his clothing. We stepped back from the closet and looked at one another without a word.

Talking loudly about guns, police and my time in the ‘Special Ops’, while Nick was taking warm up swings with the bat in the living room, we finally decided that the most likely explanation to the sound was that someone had broken into our house and was trapped in Nick’s bedroom when Nick came home from dinner. This burglar had likely crawled into the attic to hide until we were gone or asleep. At this point Nick called the police, we both knew it was better to be safe than sorry.

After waiting in the living room armed with various weapons, bat, axe, wine bottle and kitchen knife, a police cruiser pulled up outside. Nick said “oh crap, it’s woman.” I rushed to put my axe, knife and wine bottle away in the kitchen and came around the corner to meet the most beautiful and young police woman I have ever met. This was very bad! As she walked in the front door she asked what the problem was and how we were doing. We told her our theory about the sound and showed her to Nick’s bedroom. Nick climbed through the trap door and shone her maglight around the attic to look for the alleged perpetrator as she waited below with me. After finding no one up in the attic, she gave her professional opinion that everything was fine here and rolling her eyes just a little (or maybe it was my imagination) she went on her fine way.

When she left Nick and I walked slowly, shoulders slumped into the living room. I lay down on the floor and wanted to die. Two grown men armed with baseball bats had let a pretty sorority girl protect them from the scary sound! We had sunk to a new low I felt, but for me, it was much worse. Nick is getting married in two weeks, I’m single, and need to maintain my reputation as an eligible bachelor. I feel sure that rep is threatened today in Knoxville. Beautiful 25 year old girls know other beautiful 25 year old girls, and everyone knows that girls talk. To make things worse this one had a CB in her car.

We got up the courage to venture into the basement to see what the sound could have been. After a few minutes searching we found that my bike tire had popped, after being over inflated by the bike shop that day. Now it seems to me that the bike tire was a suitable metaphor for my over inflated ego which also burst on that fateful night.

I gratefully acknowledge the feedback from Sarah R. and Alyssa Bell (http://www.alyssakabell.com/) to assist the telling of this story.

Trip to CDC in Atlanta

Here are some pictures of two trips during the month of April. The first is from a State Park west of Nashville where I went to the Tennessee Water Resources Symposium. I learned a lot about water resource issues in Tennessee and Kentucky, and heard some stories of houses disappearing into sink holes. The rest of the pictures are from an overnight field trip to the CDC in Atlanta with a seminar class called "Pathogens in Hydrology" from UT. We met some like minded people at the CDC trying to understand the movement of pathogens in surface and subsurface waters, and I was blown away by how modern and clean everything was.

There is a book by Lori Garret called "The coming Plague" (1996), that describes the early year of the CDC, when there were "Disease Cowboys" trotting the globe discovering new deadly outbreaks of Hemorrhagic Fever (e.g. Ebola or Lassa Virus) and risking their own lives to find an etiologic agent and/or a vector (something carrying that agent) before the whole village is wiped out. One of the conclusions of her book is that during the bubonic plague in Europe each time the plague spread west ward from eastern Europe it took many months to arrive in Britain. This was related to speed of travel. Today, a highly infective virus would be spread to every major city in the world in three days, giving organizations like the CDC almost no time to react. It’s easy to see why the CDC is such an important institution for us all (even Canadians), nevertheless I like being at a University where we are some steps removed from all the tyrannous politics.

View of the little man-made lake in Montgomery State Park

Candace

Amanda and Ryan acting Crazy

Responsible Driver (who was too fast for the others to catch)

Peter, Lizzie and Alyssa

Our Class outside the Global Communications Center (in case of a massive outbreak)

The First Geology Class Ever to visit the CDC

Professor Larry McKay

How much is the bill?!

Science, Evolution and Religion

I get mixed reactions from people when they find out I am a scientist AND a Christian. This seems quite normal to me. Here is a link to a great talk on NPR (National Public Radio) by Francis Collins from the Human Genome Project. I find his views, expressed here, very similar to mine.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9207913

Another famous Geneticist is Richard Dawkins. He is British and an Atheist, who is quite hostile towards those that believe in God. Here is an interview with him also on NPR the day before.

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/
rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=28-Mar-07

St. Patty's Day

This is what happens when you put too much green food dye in your beer. They shouldn't have let me do it myself!

Driving through Maryville to the Smoky Mountains

River in the Smokies

Uprooted tree exposing shale rock

Feels like Canada

Nice lookout towards South Carlina

Yes, I'm a mountain man!

Driving back into Knoxville

Canadian visitors at the Tomato Head

Stream development behind my house

3rd Creek

The University of Tennessee