Karimba Primary School, by AP6.

Last week I was in London to report on the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s centenary conference, called, ‘Meeting the Millennium Development Goals’.

Professor Estambale from the University of Nairobi talked about whether preventing malaria in schoolchildren helped them learn better (you can read my story on it here).

He talked about the design of the study and his results. In explaining his figures for why not all the children recruited to receive treatment were tested afterwards, he said matter-of-factly, “three of them died”, and continued to explain why other children were not in the final figures.

I had one of those stop-life moments. Three of them died! Here was a man in London explaining his scientific results, just like so many other scientists, but he had to factor in that some of his study participants died. And this was in the group that received treatment! There were more in the placebo group. The deaths weren’t anything to do with his study - it’s just that in Africa, children die, for all sorts of reasons.

Of course we all know that children in Africa die all the time, but it was one of those moments that brought it home to me. I imagine all of the people I know working in science in developed countries who design studies, worrying about so many different factors, trying to recruit enough volunteers – imagine if some of them just died? Halfway through your study, they die for completely unrelated reasons, which you then factor into your results.

I guess it was also shocking because I associate African children dying as flyblown toddlers suffering from malnutrition, not school-age children, ready to sit tests at the end of the term so they can move on in life. I’ve never been a starving toddler (good work mum), but I have been a primary school kid cruising along through childhood, like the kids in the study.

It’s unimaginable that school kids could ever just die matter-of-factly in Western Europe. Needless to say, we have to stop it happening in other parts of the world.

Since I’ve already bloated my carbon footprint with long haul flights this year, and intend to do so at least twice more, it’s only fair that I make an effort while at home in Cambridge, and traveling around Cambridgeshire where the public transport is half decent.I did an interview at Melbourn, a village in Cambridgeshire, accessible by train and bus from Cambridge. I tested out both – train there, bus back – train was better, even though the bus left from directly in front of the science park there, while the train left me with a 15 minute trek through a smelly field.

I still think rural England is strange – rural in the loosest sense of the word, given you have cows grazing next to science parks, and porsche showrooms nested in ancient villages.

Melbourn is a cute little village – the type of place I would have no reason to visit if it weren’t for work. It’s nice that my work allows me to get into the corners of England tourists don’t see.