The main reason I'm choosing South Africa is that when I was an undergraduate, I actually did a study abroad in Cape Town. And sort of fell in love with the country and the cultures there. And have been returning ever since. But I think a lot of research is being done there just because South Africa is a very interesting place in that, it has, for the lack of a better term, the first world and the third world all on the same block. It has all of the resources for prevention and treatment and intervention. Yet, it also has high levels of HIV and TB to match countries that are lacking in its resources. And so, in ways, it's a crucible of globalization, where you have such high inequality, such great resources to tackle academics. But at the same time such high poverty and high rates of disease that people from around the world are coming to sort of examine what it means to be in this crucible of inequality. How, with the resources at hand, can we intervene on some of the diseases. And how is that translatable into some of the other countries in the area. Another project that I've been working on in South Africa is on the prevention of TB transmission. And my advisors down at the University of Cape Town, they have a long track record of working in HIV and TB. And right now they're focused on how ventilation affects TB transmission. And so, they've devised some nifty tools to measure carbon dioxide in a room to use that as a surrogate for re-breathe liters of carbon dioxide. And through some nifty equations are able to figure out to equate, what your risk of TB is in a room depending on how many re-breathe liters you have. And that can change, obviously, just by opening a window. And so, what we've been working on is finding out, well, measuring in high schools, how many liters are students re-breathing, and what is their risk of TB? And we found that there's actually a very high risk in the schools around Cape Town of transmitting TB. A risk that can be reduced simply by increasing the ventilation. So right now what we're working on is trying to get some of this hard data to the policy makers to mandate a certain amount of windows open and ventilation in the schools to prevent transmission. And what's interesting about it is that these recommendations were made 100 years ago. When they used to build schools with big windows and on both sides, lots of room for fresh air to go through. And in the fight against TB, that's all we had, was ventilation. Now, that we have drugs to treat it and better ways of tracking down people and diagnosing TB, our theory is that we've become complacent with it. And so, we no longer build the nice, big, open buildings, and we no longer tell the schools, you have to have this open, this amount of windows open, even if it's cold outside. And given what I was talking about earlier, the authority according to the sciences, we're actually having to make scientific arguments for this now, instead of saying, it's pretty obvious. Just keep the windows open, and they'll be less TB. No, they need hard data. So we've been using equations to get them this hard data to say, okay, if you don't keep this window open, this many more people are going to be infected because this is what the ventilation is reduced to. And so, it's sort of sad, in a way, that we've gotten to the point where everything is so technical that all arguments need to be made in a technical fashion. There's no more room for moral arguments or normative arguments. And I guess we're lucky, in this case, that we were able to find some equations that could convince people of what we wanted to convince them of. But in things like gender inequality and how it drives the HIV epidemic, there are no real equations for that. And so, that's what a lot of us are working on now. How can we show more scientifically, what is apparent to everybody who has their eyes open? That is that gender inequality is driving this epidemic. How can we show this more scientifically? So that the policy makers do really pay attention to it and really implement policies not just lip service but really
