Crystal clear...

Our son Mark has just had some work published in the journal CrystEngComm – it is related to research he has participated in as part of his PhD course and concerns the laboratory powder X-ray diffraction data on an X-ray amorphous mixture of carbemazepine and indomethacin…  umm, makes my prescribing of good old gentian violet to put on wounds here seem rather tame!

It’s an interesting contrast though.  Mark’s research will hopefully lead to better tools to evaluate new medicines.  Yet some research has led to useful treatments like gentian violet being phased out in the west so that painful conditions like herpes stomatitis [very sore mouth] have to be treated instead with expensive things like Difflam spray that don’t, in my experience, work half as well as what we have here!

Then there is the contrast in costs: in my department at home I would happily inject a dose of surfactant down an endotracheal tube of a premature baby with respiratrory distress that would cost a couple of hundred pounds - here that would be about 900,000 Uganda shillings which would pay a nurse for a few months…

Research in the past has made a huge impact here - the work on producing vaccines has changed the spectrum of diseases.  When we first came here over 24 years ago the most shocking thing was the "measles room" full of terribly sad cases of adults and children.  Many were seriously ill, some going blind, some with meningitis etc.  Now we don't see any cases at all as immunisation has prevented the spread of the disease.