Infectious Disease

The OHSS project will address a problem of the lack of access of females at risk in Kabul's sex workers and drug user network to basic reproductive health care prevention products, specifically condoms, syringes, feminine products and the like. These essential health products are for protection against sexually transmitted infections and for contraception and reproductive health. Female sex workers and drug users in Kabul City are generally excluded from easy access to the market,

Nearly 80% of Rwandans, and billions of people worldwide, live on dirt floors. Replacing a dirt floor with a clean one has been shown to reduce diarrheal disease by 49% and parasitic infections by 78%; clean floors also improve cognitive development in children and mental health in adults. EarthEnable provides an affordable alternative to dirt floors: locally sourced, earthen floors that are 75% cheaper than a concrete floor.

Fyodor has commercialized the Urine Malaria Test (UMT) - the first and only non-blood dipstick test that tells within 25 minutes if a fever is malaria, and works just like a pregnancy test. With the UMT, we are making it possible for anyone with a fever to be promptly tested, particularly in settings where access to formal healthcare facilities may be limited. In this project, we aim to roll out the UMT at scale and expand access to malaria testing in emerging markets.

A key barrier that prevents the distribution and access to life saving vaccines to majority of children 0-5 years especially from vulnerable, poor remote communities has been lack of proper identification and registration mechanisms.Putting the child at the center of the tracking efforts is not as simple, as majority of children especially in poor infrastructure and poor resource settings as well as remote and vulnerable communities have no formal record of their existence.The clarion call for the universal health care coverage and the SDG 3 target 3:2 seeks to end preventable deaths by th

Stephan Sieber of the Technical University of Munich in Germany will work together with Véronique Dartois of Hackensack Meridian Health in the U.S. to test whether his new antibiotic, which uniquely activates, as well as inactivates, molecular pathways to destroy certain pathogenic bacteria, can be adapted to kill the related Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), which causes tuberculosis. Current antibiotic treatments are lengthy, and it remains difficult to completely destroy all the bacteria in the body.

Alexander Aiken of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will use the Matched Parallel Cohort (MPC) method in a multi-site study to measure the impact of antibiotic-resistant infections on mortality in low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. More complete data on antimicrobial resistance for this population is greatly needed, even though preliminary data suggests that mortality rates are likely higher than for high-income countries.

Andrew Greenhill of Federation University Australia in Australia, along with partners at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, will use advanced environmental microbiology methods to study microbial community dynamics associated with survival of the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi in aquatic environments in Papua New Guinea. "Typhoid Mary" Mallon was an Irish-American cook, written into infectious disease folklore as the first asymptomatic carrier of S. Typhi.

Itoro Ata of the Solina Center for International Development and Research in Nigeria will implement a program to support unemployed mothers in Nigeria by linking education on the importance of vaccinations with vocational skills education and training to improve immunization coverage. Many rural areas in Nigeria have consistently low rates of routine immunization and large populations of unemployed, stay-at-home mothers whose children are at risk of vaccine-preventable disease.

Jason Andrews of Stanford University in the U.S. will study the association between the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi and its bacteriophage in both aquatic environments and the human gastrointestinal tract to see if they influence geographic and seasonal disease outbreaks in Bangladesh. The ecology and evolution of many know bacterial pathogens including V. cholerae are affected by the viruses (bacteriophage) that infect them. Indeed, seasonal cholera epidemics are inversely correlated with phage prevalence in water.

Windy Tanner, formerly at the University of Utah and now at Yale University in the U.S., together with Jim VanDerslice of the University of Utah and colleagues from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Pakistan, will analyze water samples to determine the conditions that promote the survival of the typhoid fever causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi, and they will use metagenomic deconvolution to identify any gene exchange from other microbial species that may produce drug-resistant strains. S.