#17 - Worms 'n' All.

#17 - Worms n all

Well Tuesday comes and is a day of reckoning for the intestinal parasites (worms) in the folks of the village. Armed with de-wormer and Albendazole I hit the circuit today and dosed everyone who has had an elevated eosinophil count in the last 2 months. I got those worms running scared. Mrs Enosa (one of our health workers) and I cruised the street (yes singular- only one road with houses) and dosed people, collected blood tests and generally got out into the community to do what has been termed "core business" primary health.  It was surreal sitting on the beach taking blood tests, visiting homes and getting out into the fresh air armed with charts and a detective like yearning to track down all the "health check up" dodgers.

Tomorrow as promised I'm down at the primary school and screening kids for those sores. Compliance with antibiotics is a massive problem in aboriginal and Torres Strait communities.  If you give a parent a course of antibiotics for bacterial infections, there are slim chances that they will finish the course, leading to resistant strains of the bugs that followup antibiotics won't kill. So the strategy is to seek the kids with infected sores early, and kit them hard with big doses of penicillin in the form of a nasty (and I mean nasty) IM injection in their bum.  The parents win because , by their own admission, aren't "hassled" by having to remember to give medicine 4 times per day.  We win because the needle is so big that it lasts for the a week - it is a virtual silver bullet!   The kids, though the limp out with tears and vengeance in their eyes win because their wounds heal and they dont end up on kidney dialysis or renal transplant in their 20s.   It is a big deal.  Wounds and scratched insect bites turn into festering craters called Tropical ulcers, that resemble volcanoes. So tomorrow , I'm off to school to screen the 90 or so kids....I might ask about worm symptoms since I'm on a crusade.

The supply barge made it here this morning after the week long trip around the islands with our supplies, boxes and boxes of stuff, some if which we ordered, some we didn't.  In the firm I am convinced it was "crockery coffee cups" we ordered 6. But the order form "number required" box was not items required...it was cartons of cups....whoops.  6 cartons of 24 cups arrived!!!  We ordered 10 metres of oxygen tubing and got 10 cartons of 10m rolls!!  Our new ambulance stretcher arrived also but they didn't take the old one. We just got a call saying that the old trolley is still sitting on the boat ramp. So we have one ambulance, and two trolleys, with no where to put the spare.   It is a comedy if errors. 

The sun sets on another Saibai day. The swell laps at the shore, the long boats of PNG nationals are drifting out with the tide, and tranquility settles on this island paradise.  Rest well Saibai, because come this time tomorrow night and the atmosphere of State of Origin football with it's electricity will shatter your silence, and we your nurses will be armed with gloves, drips, and suture kits to patch up your people when it all goes pear shaped.