Word: kala
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...Medicine. Four years earlier, she had taken a break from her job in Alaska to work with Ethiopian refugees at a camp in Sudan but came to realize that she needed more training in tropical medicine. When MSF was scouting at the school for a doctor to take on kala-azar in Sudan, she signed up immediately...
Before MSF hired her, there had been a debate within the organization about whether a kala-azar epidemic of such massive size could be handled with no hospitals in the area. "We were going to be dealing with thousands of patients at a time, and we didn't know if it would be possible to do this out in the open and under a tree," says Johan Hesselink, who headed MSF-Holland's southern Sudan operations during that period...
...tiny insect, which cannot fly very high or far, inhabits the vast, red acacia forests, where it bites its victims in order to get protein-rich blood to develop its eggs. When female sand flies bit people driven by war or famine into the forests from areas where kala-azar was already endemic, the flies picked up the disease themselves, ready to be passed...
...Kala-azar itself was not the only problem. One day a patient who had gone mad threw a spear through another man's chest. Seaman operated and saved the man's life. Then she and De Wit operated on a man so riddled with tropical ulcers that his bones were exposed...
...whom were unable to read, required the creation of a massive card-filing system and the training of a competent local staff. Family members were taught to fill syringes to lines marked with tape and then to administer the doses themselves. "Jill Seaman has treated more cases of kala-azar than anyone else in the world," says Dr. Robert Davidson, senior lecturer in infectious and tropical diseases at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London. "She has personally dealt with more than 10,000 cases...