We've recently met with Dr. Nakato, the program officer in the Ministry of Health for the HPV vaccination program in Kitui County. She shared a great deal of information related to the nations plans to deploy a country wide HPV vaccination program to girls in the 4th grade. The intent is to vaccinate the girls against the most common causes (virus) of cervical cancer. This is a significant step in reducing the rate of woman getting cervical cancer in the future, but will only be measurable after 15 years or so when most cervical cancer begins (ages 25-49).
We also had an interesting visit with Saheed from the newly founded IBM Research Lab in Nairobi. The IBM Research Lab is located at the Catholic University of East Africa in Nairobi, which is a very nice campus. The Research Lab is just starting its operations and is temporarily utilizing office space in the new Pope Paul VI library, until the lab construction has completed.
In honor of Pope Paul VI, there was a statue of him in the courtyard of the library . The scale of the statue seemed a little odd, and our team thought that perhaps it was a gift the university could not refuse...
Saheed and his colleagues of IBM Distinguished Engineers (DE's) are also working on a related cervical cancer project. Thus far Saheed has had limited involvement on the project, and I think we put him on the hot seat to answer some of our questions about their project.
Also, towards the end of our meeting Saheed asked "which IBM research lab are you all with?" I almost fell over laughing. Seriously, we must have come across as significantly more scientific than I ever thought possible. I almost began a long story about how we work in a secret underground IBM research facility in Cincinnati where we work to make sure the other research labs are performing quality work, but I refrained ;-)
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