TB Conference, Day 2
I got up at 6:30 (well, 5:30 London time) - early enough to make it to the first session - but I’ve had a bit of cold hanging over me, and I decided after showering that the best thing for me to do was to try to get a little more sleep and get more out of the rest of the day, rather than haul myself across town early and fall asleep during the afternoon sessions. So I missed the 8 am “meet the experts” session with Anne’s former advisor, Anne Fanning. Her bent is always about the political angle – how can we turn good intentions into action – and usually I’m into that kind of stuff. But I figured I was not the best person – tired and sniffly – to sit around trying to come up with ways to get people fired up, when all I really wanted was a nap.
I did get up an hour or so later, grabbed a couple of croissants from the confused lady in the breakfast room (who I had totally confounded with my requests in Frenglish – and yes, I think I just made that word up – for breakfast to go), got to the Lamark metro station, and promptly got on the train going the wrong way. And not even by accident – I had very carefully reversed my route home last night and chosen the correct train for that, except that I came home from the south last night and the conference is far over to the western side of the city. Gaaah.
Back on the correct train, I got to the Palais de Congres well into the second morning session, but people walk in and out of these talks all the time, so I saw the last half of the session on contact investigations, ie. tracking down people who have been breathing the same air as known cases. This was fairly slow stuff, but ended on an interesting note with a South African who brought up the tough question of whether mothers with known resistant TB should breastfeed their babies – the pro side says yes, because a baby exposed to that disease in the home needs all the immune help it can get; but the con side says no, because those babies shouldn’t be exposed to the strong antibiotics that make it across into the milk. Tough question, with no good answer.
The next session was another plenary speaker, this one tackling the question of whether the BCG vaccine for TB will continue to work or whether its use (already marginal, in that it protects kids but doesn’t do much for adults) will fade as strains of TB change in response to the selection pressure of the vaccine. Another good question, which really just points to the idea that a new vaccine altogether is needed.
I didn’t run into Anne until I had gone to an early-afternoon working group session on migrant health and TB, an offshoot of yesterday’s session. I’ve run across this at other conferences, but I’ve never been exactly sure what a “working group” is supposed to accomplish. Apparently, this particular group’s leaders are also fairly adamant that they should still go on meeting every year even though they never do produce proposals or resolutions or any of that sort of stuff. Mostly, they just set up a listserve so that people working in that area can get in touch with each other to share info, ask for advice, etc.
We all introduced ourselves and our reasons for this interest, and after Anne & I spoke, the gal in front of us turned around and told us that she had graduated from our program at the LSHTM just a couple of years earlier. Another member of the small crowd was a third-year medicine resident from back east. When the session broke up, we four spoke in the hall for quite a while – the resident had some interesting things to say about working back east (mostly - and I’ve heard this before – that family medicine docs aren’t really allowed to do so much there as they are on the west coast, and that’s the main reason she decided on medicine instead), and Olivia, the former LSHTM student, had some interesting research going on that she’d be presenting on Saturday. She also works at McGill University in Toronto, which perked up Anne’s ears since she’s Canadian also.
Those two had much to talk about, but eventually we split up in different directions. The most interesting part of the various talks I popped into in the afternoon was a brief discussion of using a urine test instead of a sputum smear to rapidly detect TB cases. That would be a valuable advance, both because it’s hard to get kids to cough up gook out of their lungs when you want them to, and because certain groups of patients (eg. kids and AIDS patients) don’t have the immune system strength to stop TB in the lungs, and thus it’s hard to find in sputum even if it’s ravaging the rest of the body.
In any case, that finished out the day and I went to track down Anne, who was supposed to meet with a potential research contact from Zambia who didn’t get the email and didn’t show up. Instead she was chatting in Turklish (yes, I made that up too, that’s half-English half-Turkish) with an older gentleman from the migrant health session. I knew she’s been in Turkey for some time, working at an orphanage or something. She had a lot of questions, but I kind of lost the thread of the conversation, so eventually we moved on.
We headed back toward Saint Michel again, mostly because I didn’t know where else to go for cheap food. There are plenty of eateries along the Champs-Elysees, but none that would get us in and out for under 10 euros each. In Saint Michel we wandered a bit, considered about eight different ethnic varieties of food, then settled on an Indian place, mostly because we happened to be standing in front of it when we finally got too hungry to keep looking. The service was slow, but the ambience was good, if only I could get used to the fact that this is not San Francisco, and people are allowed to smoke inside, and that, annoyingly, is that.
And, plus, free entertainment: the five-foot-one manager of the restaurant we were at is apparently in a grudge match with the six-foot-two owner of the place next door over whose sign is over whose property line. This matter had little bearing on our choice of restaurant, but clearly those two took it seriously to have an actual fistfight, about two feet from our table, which I suspect is an every-other-night or so affair. Who knows, maybe they were just trying to impress the ladies. We were impressed enough to take up one of their tables for several hours while we yapped about TB and I drank wine spiked with fruit juice (Anne doesn’t drink; I’m not sure she missed out on much in this particular instance). Eventually we split up for the night, found our respective hostels, and slept off some bad wine.
I did get up an hour or so later, grabbed a couple of croissants from the confused lady in the breakfast room (who I had totally confounded with my requests in Frenglish – and yes, I think I just made that word up – for breakfast to go), got to the Lamark metro station, and promptly got on the train going the wrong way. And not even by accident – I had very carefully reversed my route home last night and chosen the correct train for that, except that I came home from the south last night and the conference is far over to the western side of the city. Gaaah.
Back on the correct train, I got to the Palais de Congres well into the second morning session, but people walk in and out of these talks all the time, so I saw the last half of the session on contact investigations, ie. tracking down people who have been breathing the same air as known cases. This was fairly slow stuff, but ended on an interesting note with a South African who brought up the tough question of whether mothers with known resistant TB should breastfeed their babies – the pro side says yes, because a baby exposed to that disease in the home needs all the immune help it can get; but the con side says no, because those babies shouldn’t be exposed to the strong antibiotics that make it across into the milk. Tough question, with no good answer.
The next session was another plenary speaker, this one tackling the question of whether the BCG vaccine for TB will continue to work or whether its use (already marginal, in that it protects kids but doesn’t do much for adults) will fade as strains of TB change in response to the selection pressure of the vaccine. Another good question, which really just points to the idea that a new vaccine altogether is needed.
I didn’t run into Anne until I had gone to an early-afternoon working group session on migrant health and TB, an offshoot of yesterday’s session. I’ve run across this at other conferences, but I’ve never been exactly sure what a “working group” is supposed to accomplish. Apparently, this particular group’s leaders are also fairly adamant that they should still go on meeting every year even though they never do produce proposals or resolutions or any of that sort of stuff. Mostly, they just set up a listserve so that people working in that area can get in touch with each other to share info, ask for advice, etc.
We all introduced ourselves and our reasons for this interest, and after Anne & I spoke, the gal in front of us turned around and told us that she had graduated from our program at the LSHTM just a couple of years earlier. Another member of the small crowd was a third-year medicine resident from back east. When the session broke up, we four spoke in the hall for quite a while – the resident had some interesting things to say about working back east (mostly - and I’ve heard this before – that family medicine docs aren’t really allowed to do so much there as they are on the west coast, and that’s the main reason she decided on medicine instead), and Olivia, the former LSHTM student, had some interesting research going on that she’d be presenting on Saturday. She also works at McGill University in Toronto, which perked up Anne’s ears since she’s Canadian also.
Those two had much to talk about, but eventually we split up in different directions. The most interesting part of the various talks I popped into in the afternoon was a brief discussion of using a urine test instead of a sputum smear to rapidly detect TB cases. That would be a valuable advance, both because it’s hard to get kids to cough up gook out of their lungs when you want them to, and because certain groups of patients (eg. kids and AIDS patients) don’t have the immune system strength to stop TB in the lungs, and thus it’s hard to find in sputum even if it’s ravaging the rest of the body.
In any case, that finished out the day and I went to track down Anne, who was supposed to meet with a potential research contact from Zambia who didn’t get the email and didn’t show up. Instead she was chatting in Turklish (yes, I made that up too, that’s half-English half-Turkish) with an older gentleman from the migrant health session. I knew she’s been in Turkey for some time, working at an orphanage or something. She had a lot of questions, but I kind of lost the thread of the conversation, so eventually we moved on.
We headed back toward Saint Michel again, mostly because I didn’t know where else to go for cheap food. There are plenty of eateries along the Champs-Elysees, but none that would get us in and out for under 10 euros each. In Saint Michel we wandered a bit, considered about eight different ethnic varieties of food, then settled on an Indian place, mostly because we happened to be standing in front of it when we finally got too hungry to keep looking. The service was slow, but the ambience was good, if only I could get used to the fact that this is not San Francisco, and people are allowed to smoke inside, and that, annoyingly, is that.
And, plus, free entertainment: the five-foot-one manager of the restaurant we were at is apparently in a grudge match with the six-foot-two owner of the place next door over whose sign is over whose property line. This matter had little bearing on our choice of restaurant, but clearly those two took it seriously to have an actual fistfight, about two feet from our table, which I suspect is an every-other-night or so affair. Who knows, maybe they were just trying to impress the ladies. We were impressed enough to take up one of their tables for several hours while we yapped about TB and I drank wine spiked with fruit juice (Anne doesn’t drink; I’m not sure she missed out on much in this particular instance). Eventually we split up for the night, found our respective hostels, and slept off some bad wine.
posted by skylanda at 7:27 AM
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