Marvi Trudeau Program Manager for Philipinas Shell Foundation Interview in English Windows Media | MP3

I’m Marvi Trudeau. I’m Program Manager for Philipinas Shell Foundation, Principal Recipient of the round five grant for Malaria of the Philippines.

A barangay malaria microscopist is really a heath volunteer of the village and she’s willing to work to become a microscopist. They’re given five weeks of training. They’re given the basics on how to do the smear, how to read the smear how to take care of the microscope.

After the five week training they go home with the microscope, they bring the microscope to their village. That’s where they do diagnosis for malaria. What happens is when a villager is sick from malaria the microscopist takes a blood sample and puts it in a slide and processes it and puts it in under the microscope and looks for the parasite in the blood smear. And they can figure out if the patient has malaria and the type of malaria that the patient has. Given the type and the strain of malaria then she is able to know the kind of medicine that should be given to a particular patient.

Putting the malaria microscopist within the village makes it easier for everyone to go to, so people will not wait for long when they get the first symptoms of malaria they go to the malaria microscopist straight away and within 30 minutes they are given the results of the diagnosis and if it’s malaria then they’re given the medicines for free. Within the village, when a patient gets sick of malaria, then the entire family is visited to check if other members of the family are also infected with malaria.