One of the pleasures of working in UCL is the opportunity to host visitors from around the world. One of our guests to the UCL Centre for Clinical Microbiology at Royal Free has been Dr Pacome Achimi Abdul, who heads the CERMEL (Centre de Recherches Médicales de Lambaréné) TB laboratory based in Lambaréné, Gabon. In this blog, he talks about the work of his laboratory.
My name is Linzy and for the last four and a half years I’ve been working as a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Clinical Microbiology at UCL in London. My job is pretty varied and I work on lots of different projects, including antimicrobial resistance, clinical microbiology, tuberculosis and sequencing methodology. I’m also part of some large African-led research […]
In a previous blog post, Sreyashi Basu described how she set up a TB education initiative, Joi Hok! in Kolkata, including a painted scroll that was used as a visual aid. Here she describes the scroll and explains how it is used.
Sreyashi Basu writes:
The Patachitra painting is made by Swarna Chitrakar, a traditional scroll painter who hails from a place called Naya village in Medinipur District. She sings about different aspects of TB as she unfurls the large scroll painting to depict the sequence of events. The culture of Patachitra music (or Patua Sangeet) have been passed down for generations and unlike other kinds of music is performed acapella style.
Here I sing about TB in Bengali, and unlike Swarna, am accompanied by my ukelele
I met Sreyashi Basu in mid-January this year. She’d dropped in to say hello to Prof Tim McHugh, who’d been a project supervisor during her UCL BSc course, which had finished the previous summer. I was amazed at how she had spent the six months after graduating setting up a TB initiative in Kolkata from scratch, coming up with an […]
Anton Chekhov’s life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1904. To mark International Clinical Trials Day, Prof Neil Stoker wonders how the then-incurable disease may have affected Chekov’s creativity and worldview, and reflects on the medical advances made by clinical trials since. Last week I exited a performance of The Three Sisters by Chekhov at Islington’s Almeida Theatre. The theatre […]
Professor Neil Stoker attended two events to mark World TB Day 2019; firstly, a reception at the UK Parliament and secondly, our World TB Day Symposium. Neil shares his reflections here. The political and the personal “28th of January. We have to strike a pretty miserable deal with our drug resistant TB patients. Their only, though by no means […]