Tom Hughes comes to visit

Trouble might come in threes but visitors to Bang Lang Da seem to come in twos. This week I’ve been thrilled to host Tom Hughes from KL, and Barry Bendell (see next posting). We met climbing trees in the UK for The Tree Company and have kept in touch ever since. He is country manager in Malaysia for an American NGO called The Wildlife Trust and has spent an unhealthy amount of time wriggling around jungles and swimming through mangrove swamps trying to catch fruit bats and flying foxes to test them for Nipah Virus. For those of us who are not seriously-nasty-disease experts, Nipah causes too much fluid to collect within the brain, and is deadly most of the time. Ie, make sure the little critter in the net doesn’t bite you.

Tom is a busy man. He’s getting married at the end of the year to a fabulous, feisty girl called Mae. They are in the process of trying to buy a house in KL. He likes jumping out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes (his fiancee has more sense). And Tom is currently setting up the Zoonotic Emergence Network in Malaysia, a collaborative research project between the Wildlife Trust’s Consortium for Conservation Medicine, the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and the Malaysian Ministry of Health. The project aims to determine if contact with wild animals during the commercial, recreational, and subsistence hunting and butchering of animals results in the zoonotic transfer of animal infections to humans.

Kindly he helped monitor the growth on Hill C as their vitals were measured again. And then went for a swim in sea at Ao Nang - in complete darkness.
At BLD we watched in amazement as a couple pulled a bucket of fish out of a channel that had been dug next to the sluice gate, having netted off the pond at high tide.
Thank you for visiting, Tom. Please come back soon, and bring your wife.