Cumulative wildlife sightings at La Selva:
• a family of howler monkeys
• countless lizards of all shapes and sizes
• many a procession of leaf cutter ants
• peccary, peccary everywhere!
• turtles in the river
• bioluminescent fungus: that's wildlife, right?
• a female quetzal, maybe? we're not entirely sure.
• frogs - tree frogs, little yellow frogs, big sapos
• I'm pretty sure I saw a bat flying the other night
• THE PRIZE: a two-toed sloth mama and her baby!
For me, the highlight of this week was getting off-station and working in the community around Puerto Viejo. We were working with the local EBAIS, going house to house, talking to people about the dangers and prevention of dengue fever. Dengue is [easily?] preventable because it is transmitted by a mosquito that breeds in clean stagnant water in and around the house. So our mission was to convey this piece of information to the local residents and help them to rid their environment of receptacles of stagnant water. Many people live in dilapidated houses and have garbage everywhere - empty plastic bottles, buckets, empty coconuts. Many also get their water from uncovered wells or keep their drinking water uncovered in a barrel near the house. All of these things are opportunities for mosquitoes to lay their eggs and continue the infective cycle of dengue.
Informing people of this simple way to nip a disease in the bud has the capacity to save people from a potentially deadly illness. However, unless people are convinced of the importance of these preventive practices at a community level, they will not change their habits or behaviors. This is where a community's public health workers are indispensable. Working on a local level, these kinds of people are able to commit more than just two mornings of engaging community members in conversations about health. They can legitimately take the time to establish a working relationship with the community and, as a result, carry more weight when it comes to convincing people to change their health behaviors.
We also did a student-led crash course in Pesticides 101 - their history, uses, mechanisms, the good, the bad and the ugly. It's quite a conundrum that things like DDT have been so instrumental in controlling diseases like malaria and pesticides help bolster the portion of the world economy that's dependent on agriculture, but pesticides with their properties that aim to kill pests are not without their own adverse effects in human systems. Lots of chronic health problems result from pesticide use and exposure, and on one hand, it seems to me we should be able to minimize our use of pesticides for the sake of the environment and ourselves.
However, to what point can we sacrifice people's immediate economic livelihoods for long-term health and environmental benefits? Are there practical ways to minimize pesticide use that don't sacrifice crop yields? What about malaria? It still kills millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, and to date, the best means of controlling the spread of the disease is vector control, which includes bed nets and residential spraying of pesticides. As recently as 2006, the WHO promoted the use of DDT, an incredibly persistent and potentially harmful pesticide that's been put on the Stockholm Convention's Dirty Dozen list of persistent organic pollutants, to control malaria in Africa. Do the costs outweigh the benefits? It's a head-scratcher.
One promising alternative to widespread use of pesticides is the more holistic approach of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) that replaces blind, extensive spraying of pesticides with common sense, spraying only as a last line of defense against pests rather than the weapon of choice. This is something that I think should be pushed and enforced in agriculture all over the world. It would immediately benefit the health of the workers who tend fields all over the world and provide benefits to the environment and global population in the long term.
On a local level, we were able to see the effects pesticide have in the northern Caribbean region of Costa Rica where they grow a lot of pineapple and banana. The communities around Guacimo county are full of plantations where they harvest pineapple and banana. Most of the plantations are owned and managed by large property owners or companies who are not held accountable for their practices. As a result, all the water sources in the area are contaminated with pesticides. People can't drink it. They shouldn't bathe or swim in it (although they do). Their livestock drink it, get sick and die, robbing people that are already poor of the few resources they have. A couple of people from the organization Foro Emaus guided us through the area's communities, sharing with us the social and environmental battles they've been fighting to improve life for the campesinos and keep the big plantation owners in line.
For Halloween, we had quite the Global Health celebration. Each student was assigned a microorganism. We had to create a costume and prepare some sort of presentation to represent our organism and perform it for the class. No one knew beforehand who was who, so trying to guess based on costumes and performances was a true test of our knowledge. I dressed up as Toxocara canis - an intestinal worm that's usually found in dogs, but it can affect humans as well. In humans, toxocara is always in its larval stage and it migrates to different parts of the human body, so I made a hat like Peter Pan (you know, the boy that never wanted to grow up) and ran around the room migrating from the intestine to the liver to the eye. It was really fun to perform as well as see what great ideas everyone else came up with. Performances included dramatic readings, dancing, singing, rapping, crawling around on the floor, and more. It was great.
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