04Oct08
Trip Start
Feb 15, 2008
1
12
13
Trip End
Ongoing
UlaanBaatar,
Mongolia
Sunday, October 5, 2008
This is blog number 11 and I only have two and a half months left in Mongolia now! Its been a while since the last blog but a lot has been happening.
First I'd better bring you up to date with the political situation I mentioned in the last blog. After some months of negociations the situation has been resolved, and there is now a national unity government ruling Mongolia. I believe the Mongolian Revolutionary Party has more seats in the government than the Mongolian Democratic Party, but the two parties are sharing power. I think everyone is delighted that a peaceful resolution has been reached. Later this month we have local elections, and this will be the next test of Mongolia's demoncracy. Campaiging for this has already begun with posters and election vans out on the streets
The pathology training course, lecture.
!Another recent success for Mongolia has been the Olympics. Mongolia had by far its best ever Olympics, winning two golds (wrestling and boxing) and two silvers (boxing and shooting). The wrestling gold was the highlight as wrestling is hugely important in Mongolia - it is one of the three manly sports and has a very big following. Only a few days after the win, the wrestler was appearing on posters around the city. He is definitely hero number one in Mongolia at the moment! I really enjoyed the Olympics because we are in the same time zone as Beijing, so I could watch the evening track and field events live in the evening, and because the TV coverage was excellent. I had a choice between 16 Chinese, Mongolia and Russian channels, each usually showing a different sport. And all the channels really concentrated on the sport with very little if any interviews with competitors or their family and friends, thank goodness. I do think its very silly asking someone how they feel when they have just won a gold medal. How do you think they feel?! Happily I got none of that, I just got to watch loads of different sports, uninterupted, and it was lovely! None of the commentary was in English but it didn't seem to matter.
I have also been on another trip into the countryside
The pathology training group
. In the middle of August I travelled north to visit the Darhan and Selenge regional veterinary laboratories. Darhan is about 3 hours north of UB and is the second largest city in Mongolia. It is a mining town but much nicer than you would expect! The veterinary laboratory is new, it was only begun last year so isn't in full working order yet. It was very interesting to have some input into the setting up of a lab. As well as inspecting the lab, we had been asked by the authorities to visit to a herding family about 2 hours east of Darhan, from where three members of the family had recently been hospitalised with brucellosis. Brucellosis is caught from cattle, sheep or goats and is a particular problem in Mongolia. We were asked to drive out to inspect the flock of sheep and goats of the affected herding family. At that moment the animals were near Sharingol which is a great big open pit coal mine with an associated little town. It was quite strange driving through the beautiful Mongolian countryside for 2 hours, passing only the occasional car or ger, and suddenly coming over the top of the hill and seeing the mine in front of you! We picked up the local vet from Sharingol, drove on to the farm and took some samples from a selection of animals. We tested the samples straight away in the family's ger using a simple lab test and found three sheep were positive. So it looks likely that this family had been infected from their flock. The investigation is ongoing.
The workshop location, 4 hours from UB
After the work in and around Darhan we travelled north to Sukhbaatar town, the capital of Selenge province. The regional laboratory here was undergoing some serious renovations and was just a shell with all its equipment in storage. Sukhbaatar town is very near the Russian border and gets particularly cold in winter. We had a look at the boiler of the laboratory which looked like a serious piece of kit! It is kept going for 7 months of the year, day and night, and burns 250 tons of coal during this time. After inspecting the laboratory we travelled about another 5km north to the Russian border. There is a "buffer zone" between the two countries where no one is allowed to go, but we could look over that into Russia. It was a beautiful spot, with two big rivers merging and the trans-Mongolia railway weaving along their banks. Really pretty.
At the end of August I visited the UK for three weeks. I had some meetings to attend, some project proposal ideas to investigate, and also a brucellosis conference to go to. As I mentioned before brucellosis is one of Mongolia's biggest problems at the moment, so I used some of my Wellcome Trust grant to attend the International Brucellosis Conference in Egham (near London). It was an excellent conference and I learnt a lot that was very relevant to the Mongolian situation. Luckily, seven Mongolian scientists were sponsored by a Swiss development charity to attend the conference too, resulting in a good sized Mongolian delegation which was excellent
Scenery during the drive to the workshop.
. The conference focused our attention on some areas of brucellosis control that could be improved in Mongolia, and we are hoping to draw up a new brucellosis eradication campaign plan soon. As a follow up to the conference we recently had a group of 27 scientists attend a weekend workshop in the Mongolian countryside, about 4 hours drive from UB, to discuss how to control brucellosis in Mongolia. Brucellosis is more common in Mongolian people than anywhere else in the whole world, so it is a situation which requires some action.When I returned to Mongolia in early September I had a lovely visit from Julia, Ali and Adi who I used to work with at Imperial College London. I really enjoyed showing them round UB, and getting them to experience urban Mongolian life such as the joys of local bus rides and how to avoid open man holes in the street! They spent a very happy four days horse riding round the steppes and forests near UB with a group called Stepperiders. This is a Mongolian family company and by all accounts excellent.
My work continues to go very well. I am past the "setting up" stage with a couple of diagnostic methods - cell culture and immunohistochemistry - and are now using these techniques in a practical way. We have also made great strides in pathology
Collecting blood samples near Sharingol
. Recently the Wildlife Conservation Society, who have a permanent office here in Mongolia, sponsored a US pathologist, Harley, to come to our laboratory and train the regional veterinarians to do a top class post mortem. We had about 20 vets from the regional veterinary laboratories come to UB and Harley gave them some great lectures on pathology and diseases which affect both wildlife and domestic animals, then we had a practical session involving a sheep post mortem. The vets really enjoyed it and have promised to do more post mortems and send their samples in to us at the central lab for analysis. The weather is getting colder very quickly now! It is below freezing most nights and jolly cold as I walk to work at 8am. I am wearing thermals and gloves already! And its only going to get colder! The trees are busily changing colour from green to orange and it just gorgeous.
I do hope all is well with everyone,
Pip
