Infectious Disease

Tapash Roy, Subhash Chandir and Toufiq Rahman of IRD Global in Singapore will improve child immunization coverage among the homeless, or floating, populations in urban slums in Bangladesh by offering vaccines during evening sessions at existing shelters. The mortality rate for children under five in Bangladesh is high, and many deaths would be preventable with better vaccination coverage.

Amos Kahwa of Damax Solutions Company Ltd. in Tanzania will use human-centered design principles to develop a community-supported, social marketing approach that breaks down misconceptions and psychosocial barriers to immunization in developing countries and thereby increases demand. Research has identified several causes of the current low demand for vaccinations including misconceptions about safety, inadequate knowledge of schedules, and negative experiences at clinics. Current approaches designed to increase demand such as better education and incentives have had a limited effect.

Anita Shet of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the U.S. will seek to increase childhood vaccination coverage in India and Nigeria by identifying opportunities for catch-up vaccinations when under-vaccinated children are hospitalized. Of the three million people who die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, about half are children under the age of five, many of whom live in areas where vaccinations are available, but inequitably distributed.

Ernest Darhok of Broadreach in South Africa will use mobile technology to improve access to child immunization services for populations living on the Kenya-Uganda border and help ensure all children are fully vaccinated. Refugee populations living in cross-border settings and migrant communities are particularly difficult to cover because of limited access, poor coordination across borders, and lack of efficient tracking.

Robert Kingsley of the Quadram Institute Bioscience in the United Kingdom will locate the typhoid fever-causing bacteria S. Typhi in water reservoirs in Harare, Zimbabwe, and identify any associated protozoa species present in the water that may be supporting disease spread. Typhoid fever is endemic in Zimbabwe, with several major outbreaks reported in the last decade. The bacteria persist in unclean aquatic environments, possibly supported by protozoa, and are transmitted to humans through ingestion of contaminated drinking water. They will detect S.

Aaron Jenkins of the University of Sydney in Australia will combine genomics approaches with physical chemistry to identify the organisms and environmental factors in riverbeds that support the survival and spread of the bacterium, Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, which causes typhoid. Aquatic environments are a major reservoir of typhoid, but how the bacteria survive in these conditions is unclear, making it difficult to prevent the disease spreading to humans. They hypothesize that S.

Caroline Aura from the University of Nairobi in Kenya will teach frontline health workers and caregivers new skills so they can apply simple techniques such as swaddling and rocking to lessen the pain and distress of infants during injections to improve vaccination rates. Vaccination rates are still too low in many low-resource settings, which may be due in part to the discomfort they cause infants. This in turn makes caregivers reluctant to obtain all the recommended vaccinations for their children.

Jessica Craig of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in the U.S. will use existing food distribution networks in low-income countries to publicize the importance of vaccination and inform caregivers when, where, and how to access local vaccine services by printing them on food labels, food and water carrying tools, and receipts. They will test whether their approach can improve vaccination rates using one rural and one urban area each in Kenya and in the Central African Republic.

Feng Fu of Dartmouth College in the U.S. will use social networks to promote positive attitudes and overcome negative views of vaccinations and thereby increase demand. The success of vaccinations has led to steep declines in the incidence of many serious diseases. However, this has decreased the perception of disease risk and thereby lowered vaccination coverage as parents concerns switch to other factors, such as cost and the perceived risk of the vaccination itself, which are fueled via social media channels.

Matthew DeLisa of Cornell University in the U.S. will create a cell-free synthetic biology platform for low-income settings that produces thermostable polysaccharide-based conjugate vaccines against diarrheal pathogens upon the addition of water to a single tube. Half-a-million children under age five die each year from diarrhea and dysentery, the majority in low- and middle-income countries. Two major causes of bacterial diarrhea are enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) and Shigella strains.