One other exciting event that occurred during my internship: A positive case of A H1N1 was discovered in an American tourist in Las Salinas on June 16, 2009. In response to this finding, we, the staff at the clinic, had to manage the situation in order to ensure that the patient had not infected others in his hotel or anyone in the community. Since I speak both English and Spanish, I served as an interpreter when the team was visiting the hotel of the patient. Additionally, with my training as an emergency medical technician, was able to take down necessary health-related information. I also visited individual houses with my supervisor to notify the population of the positive case and to educate them on prevention methods.
As we were going around to other hotels, we discovered that none of them had gotten wind of this news. This situation needed to be rectified immediately, as the tourism industry is the interface with the most potencial for the transmission of the virus. A) Tourists could bring the virus into the community and possible infect the workers at the hotel, who are mostly locals. B) If there were a local case (for example, if someone got infected whilst traveling from Managua, where a majority of the cases have been), they could likewise transmit the disease to tourists. Thus, I traveled with Ministry of Health officials to give the same public health workshops and to fortify the communication between the clinic and the hotels (with my project mini fund, we were able to buy a cell phone for the clinic - before, there was no way for people to contact the health workers)
The Ministry of Health also received donations of flu vaccines from the government of Venezuela, which were designated for the teachers. As we gave out these vaccinations, it was interesting to hear the mixed emotions towards this donation - a cross between relief for this preventative measure (although this vaccine is not specifically for A H1N1, it was meant to fortify the immune system against the disease) and the skepticism of the political motives for this donation.
Whilst it was very exciting to work on the frontlines against this epidemic, this work proved extremely challenging for a variety of reasons; The A H1N1 case was discovered at end of the month, when the clinic has to make all sorts of reports... so although the ministry of health thought that visiting the other hotels to spread this news was a good idea, they refused to provide transportation for us to go to these hotels (and these hotels were about 40 minutes drive from our clinic) Therefore I had to look to other sources of support. I ended up collaborating with a private clinic on this undertaking, but the contact we had there acted as if it were only a project that concerned the PUBLIC clinic, even though wouldn't it make sense to think of it as public health work that is in the interest of everyone? In any case, we have to make the best of the resources that we can access and not dwell on the things that we lack, which has been an invaluable lesson.
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