Community-based research, service and outreach underscores efforts in our Department of Environmental and Global Health, and the College of Public Health and Health Professions. The UF Aquatic Pathobiology Laboratories are contributing to aquaculture extension, clean water supplies and malaria control in and around Gressier, Haiti. Gressier is approximately 20 miles West of Port Au Prince, the capitol of Haiti (see inset map, below). Within Gressier, the Christianville community supports a guest house, farm and fish culture facilities, a school and medical facilities. Christianville provides a base camp for UF's "Demen Miyo Ayiti" (A Better Tomorrow for Haiti) Project. Click here for an interactive Google map of the Christianville community.
Andy collecting water samples for enteric and Vibrio bacteria. Many surface waterways can be altered dramatically by habitat alteration and heavy rainfall events. Bacterial loading in these waters can be influenced by environmental conditions and community use patterns. Many surface waters are used for washing, laundering, drinking, cooking, irrigating, and relief from heat.
Andy Kane has been working with Edsel Redden, FISH Ministries, to establish pond volume calculations, proper feeding rations, aeration and fertilization methods, water quality standards, and disease and parasite control at the Christianville Fish Farm in Gressier, Haiti. The picture below on the left shows some of the concrete grow-out ponds (note the two people at the center of the second pond from the foreground for scale). On the right, Andy examines a bag of tilapia fry for behavior associated with ciliate parasites. Over the course of a decade Edsel Redden has worked to provide infrastructure fostering self-sufficiency in terms of protein production in the form of eggs and tilapia for school feeding programs. Nutrition from these sources provides the majority of protein that school children in the area receive.
Other work, coordinated by Dr. Bernard Okech (medical entomologist), focuses on chloroquine resistant malaria. Malaria is naturally transmitted by the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito (image below, left). When a mosquito bites an infected person, a small amount of blood is taken, which contains malaria parasites. The parasite, Plasmodium falciparum (shown amidst human red blood cells, below, right), develop within the mosquito, and are injected with the mosquito's saliva into the next person being bitten. After a two or more weeks of incubaction in the human host's liver, the malaria parasites multiply within red blood cells, causing symptoms that include fever and headache, and in severe cases, coma and death.
| The image below shows Drs. Kane and Okech at the Family Health Mission Clinic in Blanchard, Haiti. Testing clinical samples for malaria, sickle cell anemia, and glucose-6-dehydrogenase deficicany benefited patients as well as service-based research through University of Florida. |
Programmatic efforts have been positively affected by:
Large institutional support from the University of Florida, a university-wide working group, and a public health laboratory in Haiti;
Diversity of faculty and expertise from the College of Public Health and Health Professions, College of Medicine, the Emerging Pathogens Institute, and the Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences, among others;
- Functional relationships with stong community leaders, NGOs and ministries;
Service in diverse geographical regions in Haiti; and
- Needs-based engagement.
Aquatic Pathobiology Laboratory
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