Integration

Fine, HP was a lot of fun and we acquired a lot of information and insight into the problem. But did this exercise help our project at all in any meaningful way? And if so how?

The answers to this question is, Of course, Human Practices have shaped Project BacMan in a very important way as we cared to integrate the pooled in knowledge from HP into our proposal of the design.

Of particular significance was yet another Expert Interaction that the team had.

Hence Team IISER Kolkata decided to organize awareness camps with the following motives:

We interviewed a team of physicians working at the Carnival Hospital, Kalyani. The highlights from the discussion were the following:

• Arsenicosis doesn’t have a permanent cure as such.
• Usually doctors treat only the symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning and not the actual cause.
• Local hospitals lack the sophistication to test the patients on a case by case basis to diagnose whether the symptoms stem from accumulation of arsenic or are due to other microbial infections, etc.
• The patient is often ignored once the symptoms like skin lesions get temporarily cured. As a result, many a times patients in early stages remain exposed to high levels of arsenic intake through water and food that only later manifests as more deadly ailments like cancer, heart issues, neuropathy, etc.
• Current therapies targeted to cure the cause of arsenicosis are very expensive and hence unaffordable and inaccesible to the large masses of poor population that are actually at a greater risk of consuming unsafe water and contaminated food.
• Therefore, a large void of an affordable preventive therapy targeted towards arsenicosis is sensed.

This interaction made us restless as we returned to our institute with a determination of attempting to solve this case of arsenicosis. After subsequent thorough literature review and several brainstorming sessions, we came up with BacMan, a probiotic bacteria that can sequester Arsenic from the human gut which will be delivered to individuals showing early symptoms of arsenicosis to shield them from further exposure of the toxic heavy metal.

This is how HP was integrated with our project plan and idea as our project now shifted from a curative based approach to a more prevention based approach.