Jiading volunteers bring their message of staying healthy
Print Edition
FIVE young medical staff from Jiading District’s health care system have been working as volunteers in southwest China’s Yunnan Province since August.
They are stationed at the Honghe Hani and Yi, and Wenshan Zhuang and Miao autonomous prefectures.
On the first day that Zhang Nan and Wang Haiwei reported for duty at the center for disease control at Honghe’s Mengzi City — August 18, a bird flu epidemic broke out. One child was isolated for having been infected with the H9N2 virus.
Bird flu outbreak
Zhang understood that the epidemic is caused by a low pathogenic virus string but she still made sure she was fully prepared. She donned her medical mask, cap and clothes strictly in accordance with Level II protection in the CDC protocols before she set out with local CDC employees to collect samples at all eight of the city’s live poultry markets.
It was exhausting but necessary work. Six of the markets turned out to be positive for the H9N2 virus after test results were revealed.
Wang, Zhang’s colleague volunteer in Honghe, joined local CDC workers to carry out disinfection work at all the live poultry markets.
Besides dealing with bird flu, Jia-ding young medical workers also had to collect samples to prevent an outbreak of the plague. Wang’s first task in the rural area of Mengzi was to monitor the density of rats in a village in the Shuitian Town from September 1. The town is about 40 kilometers from downtown Mengzi but the road connecting them is very rough so it was a trip that took over two hours.
Wang set up many cages using sausages to attract the rats. The next day, the cages were collected and any rats caught were sent for testing.
Public health education
In Mengzi there are 41 villages affected by the disease and rats are blamed for passing the disease to residents. The most recent outbreak was in a remote village in the city in 1998 after an inactive period of 87 years.
Volunteers Sheng Yuwen and Deng Senmiao decided to improve the health awareness of children in mountainous areas of Guangnan County in Wenshan after Sheng found that local rural children were not in the habit of washing their hands before eating.
Sheng and Deng brought several sheets of health education lessons to Bamei Town Ake Middle School on October 19. Students packed the playground to listen to their lesson and Deng used pop songs with lyrics replaced by educational content to help students better understand what they were trying to teach. Deng also demonstrated the actions they should be taking as he sang.
Sheng said: “I feel our lessons’ significance after watching the young faces rapt with attention as they listened to what they were being taught.”
The middle school has only one doctor, a young local woman. Eighty percent of the students are children left behind while their parents go to work in the city.
The school has no health education course and most of the children were not accompanied by their parents, which made Deng and Sheng feel the urgency that they needed to do more for Yunnan during the period when volunteers are still young and able.
Working at a local hospital
Volunteer Feng Jia is a young female medical worker from Jiading and she first set out from Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, to Liuku on a trip that took her more than 10 hours. She spent one night in Liuku and then took a bus to reach Fugong County People’s Hospital in Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Region some six hours later.
She worked at the pharmacy at the hospital and tagged the shelves with names of medicines and marked expiry dates on unpacked medicine so that staff would know whether medicine was past its useful date.
These were all regarded as new and effective practices in the hospital though such practices are common in developed regions of the country.
The five volunteers all felt that they needed to contribute more to the province since they found out that the province is still less-developed in many places compared with its more renowned natural scenery.
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