Captions:
Cariamanga, Ecuador, operated as the home base for the Tropical Disease Research Program this summer. The students and staff involved in the program traveled by banana (15-person van) to Bella Maria, Chaquizcha, and Guara each day to carry out field research and help with community development programs.
Maria Jose Carrasco passes an adobe brick to Leslie Cardenas Sevilla during the initial phase of construction of the community center in Bella Maria, Ecuador. Carrasco and Sevilla are students attending Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador (PUCE) to study architecture. The Tropical Disease Institute at Ohio University has partnered with PUCE to work year-round in the fight against Chagas Disease.
Lights from the 100th birthday party of Manuel Antenor Correa shine brightly below the Milky Way in Bella Maria.
One of the most critically important activities that the Tropical Disease Research Program conducts in the field is the search and fumigation of houses. This summer, the entomology team spent their time in the field searching houses in three new communities–San Jaoquin, Quisanga, and Camayos–for chinchurros (Triatoma infestans), also called the kissing bug. The bug is a vector for a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi, which can lead to Chagas disease. Each house was searched by hand and flashlight three times before the team fumigated the homes, during which all of the family’s possessions had to be removed from the home temporarily.
Morning sunlight hits a spider’s web outside a family’s home in San Joaquin.
A beam of light steaks through cooking smoke in the kitchen of a family’s home in San Joaquin. The traditional method of building adobe houses in the area has allowed for cracks to form in the walls of many structures, enabling chinchurros to move into the spaces and threaten the home’s inhabitants with Chagas Disease. A new method of adobe-making that was designed by TDI and PUCE is being implemented in the construction of a prototype house is Guara. If it proves successful, the new method will be used in the construction of new houses throughout the area.
One of the owners of this house in San Joaquin pauses for a portrait while a team from Ohio University, PUCE, and the Ministry of Public Health in Ecuador search her home for chinchurros. The Tropical Disease Research Program has educated the people living in this and surrounding communities about Chagas Disease, which is the first step in combating its transmission.
The possibility for transmission of Chagas Disease is made even more serious by the presence of chinchurros in nests of animals around and nearby the adobe homes. Chinchurros have been found in both chicken nests and squirrel nests.
Luis Angel filters boiling sugar cane during the panela-making process in Guara. Panela, unrefined whole cane sugar that is boiled and poured into square moulds, is one of the main agricultural by-products produced in the area upon which the local economy is highly dependent.
A man living in Guara with his family who produces panela.
Sunset over the Catholic Church in Cariamanga.
