Enteric and Diarrheal Disease

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Diarrhea is a leading cause of death among children in most low-income countries. Outbreaks of diarrhea are closely related to an abundance of houseflies and research has shown that control of houseflies may have a substantial impact on diarrhea incidences. Innovators at Ifakara Health Institute will introduce a baited fly-trap as a sustainable and effective tool to reduce the transmission of related infections by controlling houseflies in slums and rural areas. The traps will be combined with increasing community awareness of houseflies to optimally locate fly-traps.

Diarrhea is the second leading cause of childhood mortality worldwide. The majority of these deaths could be prevented with ORS and zinc, however weak supply chains and other factors often limit access to these essential medicines. Rohit Ramchandani is a Doctor of Public Health candidate at Johns Hopkins, Principal at Antara Global Health Advisors and Public Health Advisor at ColaLife, an organization that is testing to what extent piggy-backing ORS and Zinc on the Coca-Cola supply chain can improve access for children living in rural parts of the developing world.

The Micronutrient Initiative's Co-Packaging for treatment of Diarrhea with Zinc + ORS and Zinc + Antibiotics for Pneumonia in Guatemala project uses social marketing to create caregiver demand for ORS and zinc for managing childhood diarrhea to establish the most effective way to scale-up ORS and zinc.

Multi-drug resistant bacteria causes infantile diarrhea in many developing countries. In spite of having access to many powerful antibiotics, many infants die due to the inability to determine the correct antibiotic for the infection in a timely manner. We propose to develop an economical diagnostic instrumentation that is linked to cell phones making it portable and fast enough to address this problem. Follow Ash Parameswaran on Twitter @nanorishi  "

The objective of this Botswana-based collaboration led by Dr. David Goldfarb was to design and evaluate a user-friendly flocked-swab specimen collection system for the identification of enteric infections. This would have immediate impact in much of the world where diarrheal disease remains deadly and for the large part undiagnosed. Using an inexpensive innovation in specimen collection, the team diagnosed previously unrecognized pathogens that had caused the severe diarrhoea of over one-third of children in a group of southern African hospitals.

Elizabeth Maga of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop genetically modified goats to produce milk rich in lysozyme. This will test the theory that lysozyme, an antimicrobial component of human milk, can mitigate the detrimental effects of malnutrition by inducing resistance to diarrheal disease.

Stephen Freedman of The Hospital for Sick Children in Canada will evaluate whether treating children who have gastroenteritis with the anti-nausea and anti-vomiting medication ondansetron could help them better tolerate oral rehydration therapy. Evaluating this treatment in children hospitalized in Pakistan could lead to ways to help children survive potentially deadly infectious episodes when there is no access to intravenous rehydration.

Anton Middelberg of the University of Queensland in Australia proposes to develop a new vaccine for rotavirus by the directed self-assembly of a safe virus-like particle in industrial reactors. The approach uses low-technology engineering methods suitable for the developing world, ensuring relevance to the communities most in need of vaccine.

Wolf-Dietrich Hardt of ETH Zurich, Institute of Microbiology in Switzerland will study the "swimming" behavior of diarrhea-causing pathogens, which move using tiny tails called flagella, to develop micro-structures that can trap the pathogen before it infects tissues. If successful, these particles could be delivery orally to prevent diarrheal illness without harming commensal gut bacteria that do not swim.