Bug Central

I finally made a decision on the hat...SPF50 and flat packable - sold! Also sold was a very big mosquito net and a double silk sheet thing...all anti bug measures that will hopefully make Belize nights a nibble free zone.....all the more important given what I find out in the coming weeks!

Isn't it funny how just when you are starting to really enjoy your holiday, something happens - oh yes, I had to go back to work. One day I was on a beach in SaltDean near Brighton basking on heated stones gazing inbetween a teenaged wizards adventures and azure skies and swimming in chilled waters and the next I was rudely awoken at 6am for a trip across town to Bug Central.


The first obstacle was how to actually get to The Hospital for Tropical Diseases....underground? overground? .... I chose Wombling free courtesy of a train to Bedford from London Bridge which dropped me at Kings Cross...easy walk from there I thought...its funny how much longer walking is than driving.....30 minutes of route marching got me there...just... with a couple of double backs to find a shabby looking building which houses the clinic around the corner from what seems like the biggest campus in Britain. Everywhere you look is UCL university buildings or hospital...seriously...for 6 blocks in each direction...and more! After finding that my contact had retired and elective partner metamorphosed from a German male to a Dutch beauty named Trudy and been subjected to the usual form filling and traipsing around getting photo ID we were ushered into our first clinic - Leprosy (and rather alot of Leishmaniasis) with the phenomenal Professor Diana Lockwood (complete with cute but huge dangly dragonfly earrings) and the research Dermatology registrar with the best hairdo in the hospital; Stephen Walker. Serious 'fro man!

Leprosy is a seriously terrible disease. Over the next few weeks I saw people with small patches of anaesthetis hypopigmented skin and little else to leprosy technicians from Afghanistan who had caught the disease from their patients and now could not use their hands, to a man with clawed hands and neuropathic damaged feet with bits of toes missing. You can catch it and kill the bacteria fairly easily but the problem is that the tissue that it likes - the Schwann cells that insulate nerves still continue dying and its that which causes the nightmare for the patients. Sometimes its just single nerves or muscles weakness if you're lucky and you've got the tuberculoid form, however if you've got the lepromatous form - it's glove and stocking time and you can't feel anything so you damage everything.


A slightly wierd thing to look for on your travels are people with the outer third of their eyebrows missing...the leprosy does that too....