Take It Back

10/13/16 • 11 min

What if one day, out of the blue, you find yourself sick—really sick—and no one knows what's wrong. This is a podcast about a sleeper illness and what one team of data scientists led by Elaine Nsoesie is doing to reduce its reach.Sam Williamson: "It felt as if I were on some kind of hallucinogenic drug. I felt really, really hot. Really cold again. The room started spinning. I got tunnel vision. I was about to black out."Ginette Methot: "I'm Ginette Methot-Seare, and you are listening to Data Crunch, a Vault Analytics production. Today we're going to talk about something that could affect you or someone you love if it hasn't already."Shawn Milne: "It still is a pretty vivid memory for me just because it was such a, such a terrible thing."Ginette: "This is Shawn Milne."Shawn: "Both of us just booked for the bathroom because we were both throwing up."Ginette: "He's describing a sickness that both he and a friend suffered from."Shawn: "On the way home, we had to keep pulling the car over, and we were just both throwing up on the side of the road. It was absolutely terrible. We were just both up all night just throwing up. Just so beat."Ginette: "While Shawn's experience lasted about 48 hours, Samuel Williamson, the person you heard speak at the beginning of our podcast, had one that lasted for about a month."Sam: "I did go to a doctor for it after a while. They convinced me to go to a doctor. He in fact told me that my stomach was just tired, which I thought was a very strange diagnosis. So he suggested that I don't eat anything for a week. I think I lost about ten to twelve pounds in the first week, and so I went a week without eating anything, and came back a week later, and he asked me if the symptoms had gone away, and I told him 'no, they were about the same,' and he said, 'okay, well you can't eat anything else for another week.' I went about three days and then pigged out."Ginette: "While everyone's body reacts differently to this type of sickness, stomach pain was one symptom that everyone we interviewed described."Amy Smart: "I remember at one point, lying on my couch in excruciating pain, and thinking, ‘this is like having a baby, only with a baby, I know it's going to end.’" Ginette: "Amy had two little girls when she got sick, and she became so ill and weak that she couldn't take care of them. Fortunately, her mom lived nearby and could take her girls during the day, and her husband was able to stay home from work to take care of her."Amy: "I couldn't, I couldn't eat. I wanted to because my body was so depleted, but I couldn't drink. I couldn't keep anything down. We went to the ER because I was so weak, and they put me on IVs and gave me morphine for the pain."Ginette: "But for Amy Smart, the person speaking here, things got a lot worse."Amy: "All that was coming out both ends was blood. And I remember feeling like, 'this is what it feels like to die.'"Ginette: "Amy described to me that it literally felt like life was leaving her body."Amy: "I didn't know when it would end, when I would feel better again. If it would take days or weeks or ever. I remember thinking, 'I'm so glad it's me and not one of my little kids' because I don't know how they would have survived it.'"Ginette: "Now put yourself in her shoes for a second: you're sick and only getting worse. When you go to the doctor, the doctor isn't sure what's wrong."Amy: "They first thought it was stomach flu, then maybe Giardia, then maybe salmonella, and then they cultured it and found I had E. coli."Aside: "E. coli contamination. Possible E. coli contamination. E. coli contamination."Amy: "By then, once it was diagnosed as E. coli, it was a relief because then they knew how to treat it, and they put me on Cipro. By then the Center for Disease Control gets involved and is interviewing and trying to match the strain."Ginette: "Now as an interesting side note,

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I Had to Run

Imagine you have to leave your home immediately, and you have little time to grab anything to take with you. You don't know where you are going—you just know you have to flee for your life. Many people face a similar situation—one in every 113 people on the earth, in fact. There are 65 million people living in a state of limbo, and they don't know what's going to happen to them, but they do know they can't go home. After losing their homes, often their loved ones, and sometimes their identity, they desperately hope for safety and a new home. This episode is where data science meets refugees.Transcript:Hadidja Nyiransekuye: “It wasn’t until I started having as a teacher and a principal of a school when people come in the middle of the night to come attack my house. That’s when I decided I think I need to run again.”Ginette Methot-Seare: “I'm Ginette Methot-Seare, and you are listening to Data Crunch, a Vault Analytics production.”Hadidja: “Just think about something threatening you. Your first reaction would be to duck away from the noise or from whatever is threatening you. Now think about somebody coming with a gun or with a machete, threatening not only your life but the life of your loved ones. You run, you run. Everybody does.”Ginette: “And that’s exactly what Hadidja Nyiransekuye did twice.”Hadidja: “The first time I run, I run because I needed to run.”Ginette: “She was fleeing from bombs.”Hadidja: “It was a mass exodus. Everybody was running, so we run like everybody else.”Ginette: “Hadidja had to flee in her PJs with four children. One of them, a baby on her back.”Hadidja: “My little girl, Lydia, was eight at the time, and I had two of my nieces.”Ginette: “Her husband, who was imminent danger, fled first. And her boys also ran before her.”Hadidja: “It was hot. We were thirsty and hungry. And these young people were perched on . . .”Ginette: “pickup trucks”Hadidja: “And they would say, ‘Keep moving, keep moving! There’s a nice place called Mugunga; that’s where you’ll get food and you’ll get water and you’ll get shelter. And I remember saying to myself, ‘People are dying of Cholera, and I’m going to Mugunga on foot—like 50 miles?’ I just didn’t think I was going to make it.”Ginette: “As a child, Hadidja had polio. Everyone one in 200 polio cases leaves its victims permanently paralyzed. For Hadidja, while her virus didn’t paralyze her, it left her disabled. She walks with a cane and a leg brace.”Hadidja: “At the time, I actually ended up at the Center for People with Disability in the Congo because I had been treated there in my teens. And of course, you just wished people would just let you spread your mat or something you have on their door so you can spend the night there. But they were asking us to get out of the city, to go to that place where they were going to be building refugee camps, so in those conditions, you actually, you hear what other people are saying. Well you just follow because it’s not like you have a choice. Nobody knows where they are going when they are refugees. That’s why they’re called forced migrants.”Ginette: “Let me go back and fill in some holes for you. Hadidja’s story starts . . . ”Hadidja: “in the town of Gisenyi. That’s where I was born and raised.” Ginette: “Her town is right inside the border of Rwanda.”Hadidja: “It’s at the border of former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo.” Ginette: “As she grew, she gained an education, became involved in women’s movements, and taught modern languages with an emphasis in applied linguistics. During that time, she married her husband, and they had four children. But then in the 1990s things became precarious in her country.”Hadidja: “People tend to think that the war in Rwanda started in ’94. Actually the war started on October 1, 1990.”Ginette: “Hadidja is referencing an invasion of a group of mostly Tutsis, a minority group,