Late last year, The New York Times reported that the United Nations was sponsoring research to slow the transfer of the HIV virus from new mothers to their newborns.
At about the same time, Jonathan Becker '98 was interning at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, working on a project that discouraged HIV-positive mothers from breastfeeding to lower the risk of spreading the disease to the child.
Such timely student scholarship has become standard at the Steinmetz Symposium, Union's annual celebration of student scholarship, research, and creativity. This year's symposium-the seventh-provided the following stories:
Several students who took part in the Kenya term abroad program ended up working with one of Africa's biggest health concerns: the threat of the AIDS virus.
About one in seven workers in Nairobi is HIV positive, and the Kenyan government, the World Health Organization, and various relief agencies are trying to educate the Kenyan public about the spread of the disease. Joining that effort last fall were Becker, Clarisa Buckner '98, and Gregory Reiser '98. Verdinia Washington '98 was involved in another aspect of Kenyan health-obstetrics.
Becker, a combined biology and math major at Union, was interested in working in health-specifically, pediatrics-and found a place at the Kenyatta National Hospital, working in outpatient clinics. He became involved with a project that tracked mothers with HIV and the transmission of the disease to their children through
breast milk. Each week, participants in the project came to the clinic, where Becker took each baby's blood and blood pressure and measured the baby's growth by taking its height and weight. With this data, doctors could track the growth of the child and monitor the transmission of the disease from mother to child.
“It was just an enlightening experience,” Becker says, emphasizing that he encountered situations that he would only have read about in textbooks back here.
Buckner, a chemistry major, also interned at the Kenyatta National Hospital and worked on the same project. Because of her interest in laboratory research, she focused on testing blood (some of which Becker might have drawn) for the HIV virus and other STDs.
Buckner had already done AIDS research in the United States. The summer before she studied abroad, she worked at the University of Pennsylvania researching a possible DNA vaccine that was based on a part of the HIV- I genome. At first mildly disappointed to be testing blood in Kenya, she soon discovered that AIDS research isn't as extensive there as in the
United States. “Their research isn't developing a cure but trying to control numbers,” she explains.
Washington, a biology major, was also able to see the differences between Kenyan and American health systems during her internship. Interested in obstetrics and gynecology, she worked alongside the head mid
wife in the labor ward at Kenyatta National Hospital.
Washington, who had never seen an actual birth before observing fourteen births in Kenya, says that she learned a great deal very quickly in her internship. She found that the facilities and the procedures were different from American
facilities – midwives handled most births, anesthesia was
rarely used, and the mothers, rarely accompanied by family members, often left the hospital about six hours after giving birth.
Washington loved the experience. “It was incredible,” she says. “It was so different from what you see in
America, but this is how they do things and this is how they survive.”
A political science major, Reiser was interested in the human rights issues of Kenyan people infected with the HIV virus. Discrimination against HIV-positive people is severe in Kenya-the discrimination seen in the film Philadelphia “times ten,” he says. In his internship, Reiser worked with the Kenya AIDS Society, the first self-help group for persons with AIDS run by Kenyans. In fact, all Kenya AIDS Society employees are
HIV-positive, and Reiser was the first to be involved in the group who is not HIV-positive.
Reiser developed a brochure dealing with confidentiality issues in Kenya, where privacy rules are somewhat unclear. Trying to describe the human effect of discrimination, Reiser interviewed twenty-five people with AIDS and conducted extensive research.
The results of his survey were startling, he says. Most people said that when others learned of their disease, they were rejected and hated. Even doctors were afraid to touch them, and some even went untreated because of
the discrimination. Every person interviewed agreed that laws to protect confidentiality should be enforced. Reiser's brochure, which was based on the interview, made this point and was distributed at World AIDS day in Nairobi.
Other Steinmetz highlights included:
Kira Sobczak, a senior civil engineering major, presented in two diverse categories: engineering and dance. A dancer since she was “able to walk”, Sobczak sees dance as “playing a sport.” After her performance she quickly changed to present a talk on her virtual term abroad, in which she teamed up with another Union student and two Turkish students to compete in a design competition.
Five students presented the database they created from daily observations of waterbirds at Collins Lake in Scotia, N.Y., collected by Carl George, professor of biology, and his students. The database allows the user to track the population of each species of waterfowl encountered over the nine-year study. George says that this is one of the longest daily censuses of waterfowl in North America.