101 degrees

Yes you read that correct, we went into the triple digits this week. Hot stuff!!

This past week has been fairly busy, two other interns and I moved into a house that we’re house sitting at. I went from this to this . Here are some other photos from the house. I think my favorite room is the kitchen, we can actually cook meals, no more microwave meals, yay!! Plus they have all of these cookbooks from around the world, so there's lots of different things to try. And the three patios are awesome, they're all screened in. The only stipulations that the owners have are that we water their plants and trees (which you can see there are a lot) and that we don’t turn the A/C below 80 degrees. :(

Monday morning in Matamoros, Mexico makes for a nice alliteration and a made for a fun morning. This Monday I went with two UT SPH staff to do a focus group with a group of women in a colonia at the border. The television station that gives the Tu Salud Si Cuenta program free airtime, asks the University to do these focus groups. We focused on participants opinions of canal siete and other television channels that they like/dislike and why they feel the way they do. We showed clips of the Tu Salud Si Cuenta segment and asked for their thoughts of the content, the set, and the people within the clips. We also asked a few questions about the radionovela program that we’ll be starting this month. It was really interesting talking with all of the women and hearing their thoughts on the television clips and radio episodes and how their lives and their family’s lives relate or don’t relate to the media around them. They were extremely open with us.

Monday afternoon, as a part of the lecture series, Dr. Loubna Tazi spoke about Molecular Epidemiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Casablanca, Morocco. There are 14 million deaths due to infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria. There are two different clarifications of TB, MDR (multiple drug resistance) and XDR (extensively drug resistant). MDR-TB is resistant to two of the first-line drugs, where as XDR-TB is resistant to all first-line drugs (3) and at least one secondary-line drug. In Morocco there are 30,000 new cases yearly, 1/5^th of these cases are in Casablanca. Dr. Tazi has made a strong report for the ancient orient of TB in Morocco. There was lots of biology to get to this point, which I can’t exactly say I understood. However, I can say that it’s a good thing that some people enjoy and understand biology. There’s a lot of work in the field to be done and this type of work is not exactly cut out for the entire population, so it’s a good thing those involved really enjoy it. Good news though, we go back to behavioral health topics on Monday, yay!!