Mangshi Workday

 After driving back to Kunming with much less to-do than on the way there, we flew to Manshi on Saturday evening and were met by officials from the hospital.  They took us  to an awesome Yunnan restaurant which was all outside, under individual thatched roof bamboo huts, and the food was the best Chinese food I've had so far.  A wide variety of tastes, including fried silk worms and purple sticky rice were all surprisingly good!

The next day we went early in the morning to the Mangshi Women and Children's Hospital, who are going to be the host of one of the projects I am working on.  In brief, HPV is a virus which causes cervical cancer, which begins as a small irregular cervical lesion and works its way up to cancer in a small percentage of cases.  It has been shown that women with HIV develop more cervical cancer than other women, which makes sense if you consider them as having little to no immune system to fight off the HPV virus.  However, it is not well known what the affect of antiretroviral therapy has on the evolution of HPV infection in HIV-positive women.  The study in Mangshi is going to be a small comparison of groups of HIV-positive women, some with experience with ART and some without, and we will compare the incidence and evolution of cervical lesions and cancer over the course of one year.

It was interesting to see the course of the preparations for the study.  In the morning, they had a planning meeting for the study, and there were actually patients present to give their input on the procedures.  I feel like at home the hospital and visiting scientific experts would not have an important meeting to plan details of a study with patients present!  They might have the patients present later, for an information meeting, but the details between the involved contributing parties would already be resolved.  

 Another step for me with this project is that Dr. Zhang, the gynecologist from Kunming who will be overseeing the actual clinical work of the project, has already done a small pilot study in Mangshi.  She wants my help to publish her results and actually gave me the data to work on!  This is the first real data I have seen in China so I am super excited for this opportunity!  Dr. Zhang seems really nice and I'm excited to get to work with her as well as Vik, from the VIGH at Vanderbilt who is the foreign PI on this project.

 Over the next few days, prepare for more of a travel journal as work temporarily ceases for some vacation in Yunnan!