Positive Feedback

As I’ve mentioned before, the STI clinic where my work is based is also a study site for a huge HIV vaccine initiative. Several team members (a clinical officer, a nurse, and a lab supervisor) just returned from the annual conference held in the U.S. and reported on their trip this morning in our team meeting. Now, I’ve been to this conference before and the majority of presentations are geared towards basic scientists and are very technical. I’ve had (very limited) training in molecular biology and immunology and often have a hard time following the talks. I thought that it is great that the team members get the opportunity to travel to the U.S., but didn’t really think they would get that much out of the conference itself.

Boy, was I wrong! They were fascinated to hear scientists from all over the world talk about things they had discovered using samples collected from their site. They were so interested to hear that the acutely infected individual identified in our clinic was infected with 3 different HIV viruses, and that two acutely infected individuals we had enrolled were infected with the exact same virus! They were so proud of our clinic aide, whose job it is to run the samples collected from patients in the exam rooms in the clinic down to the lab in the UNC Project building, because the Lilongwe samples were praised for having been processed quickly and having very few dead cells. They told the team, nurses, counselors, clinic aides, and data managers, that everything we do in the clinic matters and is making an important contribution to the HIV vaccine research. They told the team members that we should be very proud of our work and that what we do on a daily basis is making a difference.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Of course it helps to see the big picture and understand why the little tiny piece of the puzzle you are working on contributes to something much bigger. I really hope I can help the team members see the bigger picture in our partner research, and how in addition to its direct implications for Malawi can also make a contribution to the rest of the region