So, there was no power yesterday during work hours. We have a few car batteries for backup on a few key machines; but they are 4yrs old, do not hold much charge anymore and don’t get enough time to recharge on the limited city power schedule (pic in a previous post). We currently have a small 4kv generator that is being packed around the hospital to selectively run the operating theatre, a ward OR a few hospital lab test machines for a bit. With the rotating outage schedule, it now runs that way several days a week. The most we receive is a four hour block of city power during work hours (Mon, tues, Friday, Sat). Kapil, the lab manager, and two grad students covered the weekly leprosy clinic held at Patan Hospital in town today; while Saraswoti, a research assistant, and I headed to Tribhuvan University to meet with faculty there to discuss academic issues related to microbiology and biotechnology graduate coursework. We currently have two graduate students from the micro dept finishing their thesis and two new ones beginning their work in the hospital lab. Saraswoti then headed to government offices to deal with paperwork processing required for various projects. Never a dull day and never a lack of things to tackle. In the attached pic, Saraswoti and Chhatra, the other research assistant, are processing cells from new patients (back in the days we had more power). We are trying to develop a test with some Dutch collaborators to see if we can predict which patients will have a leprosy reactional episode during their first year of treatment. This would be very useful for the doctors, as no one can now predict which patients may have the damaging and sometimes very painful reactions. Potentially, this could help towards the development of intervention strategies to prevent patients from developing more nerve damage and becoming more disabled (which can still happen during the years after they have technically been “cured”).
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