We’re very excited to feature a new summer blogger for End The Neglect! Seth Hoffman will author a series of posts while conducting NTD field work in Indonesia. While Seth isn’t doing a project specifically related with the Global Network, we think his perspective and experiences will provide readers with interesting firsthand encounters with NTDs.
By: Seth Hoffman
Its 2:30am on June 5th, 2010 and I am supposed to “get up” for my flight to Indonesia in about three hours. I’m also not nearly done with my packing.
Hi. My name is Seth Hoffman, and I am going to be a junior at Cornell University. This summer I am setting out for the experience of a lifetime.
I’ll be spending the next 8 weeks working with the University of Indonesia and Leiden University Medical Center at their field sites in Flores, Indonesia. Flores is right smack dab along the path less traveled, and that is my kind of party. The project aims to attend to the issue that in many parts of the developing world, malarial and helminth (i.e. hookworms) infections are co-endemic. Investigation on the immunological associations between helminth infections and malarial parasites in co-endemic areas holds the key to answer the question whether helminths, by downregulating immune responses, increase susceptibility to malarial parasites on the one hand, but protect from cerebral malaria on the other.
The purpose of this blog is to describe the experiences of an undergraduate trying to immerse himself completely in the broad (scientific, socio-political, anthropological, etc.) aspects of the field of Global Health, specifically in regard to neglected transmitted diseases (NTDs). I am going to be helping out the doctors and scientists in the study by conducting blood analyses, stool samples, physicals, PCRs, and much more. I personally am overjoyed at being given such an opportunity to develop my medical/scientific prowess, especially in regard to hookworm, an NTD that prior to becoming involved in the field study I had little knowledge of except for what I had learned in my medical parasitology class. I have done a lot of research with malaria, but helminths and NTDs are a whole new “can of worms.”
I will also be traveling to Flores with my best friend Michael Billingsley (University of Glasgow) and my younger brother Benjamin Hoffman (Stanford University) who both happen to be pursuing medical careers as well.
Furthermore, the three of us are members of a band called Nigeria that has had some local success, and whose debut demo album Mango is currently being passed around several major music labels (fingers crossed!). As a band we plan on writing and recording a lot of music heavily influenced by our exploits in Flores to be released at the end of the summer as a free digital-download mixtape. The three of us have grown up in families fixated on tropical diseases, and work in Global Health, and we have pledged a portion of the proceeds of our album Mango to Share Our Strength’s campaign to end childhood hunger.
I truly hope that this summer¹s experiences will help to enhance my parasitological knowledge and general understanding of the grand scope of Global Health; and that is precisely what I plan to communicate to you all through this blog. If I can impart just 25% of what I hope to learn this summer onto another reader, who will then hopefully pass that new found knowledge onto another, then my blog will have been a success.
More posts, pictures, video, and music to come! Until then…I’m going to go ahead and finish packing.
Seth Hoffman is a pre-med student at Cornell University, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Global Health. He has worked for a number of years on identifying olfactory genes of Anopheles mosquitoes involved in mate and host seeking, and has published on his work in the scientific literature. He is a singer and guitarist for the band Nigeria.
