Infectious Disease

Luis Felipe Reyes at the Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia and colleagues will develop a standardized strategy for researchers to better utilize the ISARIC-COVID-19 dataset, which consists of over 520,000 hospitalized patients from more than 62 countries, and identify the causes and health impacts of severe complications. The dataset is particularly valuable because it covers varying standards-of-care around the world and could be used to study the geographic and time-based variability of the disease.

Xiaofan Liu at the City University of Hong Kong in China and colleagues will reconstruct COVID-19 transmission chains between individuals in communities and households using statistical methods applied to existing datasets to more reliably estimate COVID-19 transmission characteristics, such as reproduction rates, that are critical for planning effective control measures. Currently, transmission characteristics are estimated using aggregated-level data, which leads to inaccuracies. Ideally, data on how COVID-19 is transmitted between individuals are needed.

Andrew Boulle and colleagues at the Western Cape Government Health Department and the University of Cape Town in South Africa will use a data science approach applied to anonymized COVID-19 health data from the government health department including over one million tests and 60,000 hospital admissions, to study the clinical epidemiology and evolution of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 that emerged in South Africa and the impact on patients with existing health conditions.

Catherine Arsenault at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the U.S. and colleagues will measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated containment policies such as curfews on the quality of health care in seven countries and the rates of mortality from non-COVID conditions. They have extracted data from health management information systems spanning two years from Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Laos, Mexico, Nepal, and South Africa.

Fernando Bozza at Fiocruz in Brazil and colleagues will quantify the real-world value of COVID-19 vaccines in Brazil for protecting individuals from severe disease and for protecting the entire population from being infected. Knowing how effective vaccination is, and how durable the response in the real world is, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, it is critical for ending the pandemic.

Amira Roess of George Washington University in the U.S. will perform a longitudinal study of Campylobacter transmission in rural Bangladesh to determine all the routes of transmission to young children, both within households and from the environment. Campylobacter is a major cause of diarrheal disease in children under five years of age, but transmission routes in low- to middle-income settings are largely unknown, making it hard to control.

Ross Colgate of the University of Vermont in the U.S. will test whether mother-to-child transmission of the potentially deadly diarrhea-causing pathogen Campylobacter is a major cause of infection in infants in low- to middle-income countries. Campylobacter infections are assumed to occur via contaminated food or water, or infected animals. However, infants are often also infected even though their exposure to these sources is limited given they are immobile and only ingest milk.

Song Liang of Public Land Grant University in the U.S. will study how children in low- and middle-income settings become infected with the zoonotic pathogen Campylobacter, which causes potentially lethal diarrhea, in order to develop more effective interventions.

Aleta Williams of FHI Partners LLC in the U.S. will design, build, and test a mobile, digital tally counter for community drug distributors to accurately record data during mass drug administration campaigns for neglected tropical diseases in rural and deprived communities. Currently, these data are generally captured on paper, which is inefficient, prone to errors, and difficult to share.

Amanda Odum of the Research Triangle Institute in the U.S. will develop a mobile Application, TraceRX, to record and track drugs donated to mass drug administration campaigns in Nigeria to ensure the right drugs are in the right place at the right time. Donated drugs are currently monitored by paper methods, basic software programs, or local pharmacists, which leads to inaccurate ordering, expired drugs, and stockouts.