May072010

=May 7, 2010 - Meeting with Alex Kelly from FIMRC=

Tonight, I had dinner with Alex Kelly - he is the business manager for the FIMRC clinic in Las Delicias - it is a one-year position and he started 2.5 months ago. FIMRC is involved in many health-related projects in Las Delicias. []

We talked about water testing that FIMRC is having done - chlorine testing in households: the general story is that they are not detecting chlorine in the household water by the tests that they are using. I am asking for more details about the test method and results. The chlorine treatment on the effluent from the tanks does deliver chlorine to the water because there is evidence of over-chlorination ocassionally (via fish in pilas being killed). We talked about initiating a focused chlorine measurment program - if we can identify a simple test, then FIMRC can recruit households to test their water according to a prescribed method and record the results on a regular basis. If we get one house close to each of the storage tanks and several houses much further downhill in the community, then we could do some mapping about effectiveness of chlorine treatment.

- full water tests by ministry of the environment - the ministry collected samples of water from a few households recently. FIMRC is interested in microbial testing to correlate microbes with observations of disease. However, Alex thinks that the ministry is doing a battery of tests that may be relevant for EWB. He will share the data with us

- FIMRC is a good resource for conducting the health assessment because they already have two years of data about health issues for the children (12 and under) in the community. We should continue to pursue the goal of partnering with FIMRC for the health assessments.