Infectious Disease

Syrian children refugees are at a high risk to acquire vaccine preventable diseases. Parents lack education and information about vaccination, and tend to miss the follow-up visits vaccination booster for their children. Parents registers the vaccination on the World Health Organization card (known by the Yellow Card), however they tend to lose this card and sometimes children get vaccinated more than once, due to lack of vaccination evidence.

In Mali, a country with remote populations and threats to stability, access to accurate diagnosis, treatment and appropriate referral determines a child's survival. In 2007, the Mali Ministry of Health (MMoH) introduced Integrated Community Case Management, authorizing community health workers (CHWs) to diagnose and treat pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea and malnutrition in children under five. In 2013 Mali reported 231,548 pneumonia cases, and only 20% were treated by CHWs. Increasing the quality of CHWs’ diagnostic skills is challenged by inadequate funding.

This project will leverage existing waste collection to process faecal sludge into high-value, cost effective energy resources for the Nepalese brick manufacturing sector, thus not only having a positive effect on the environment but also lessening dependency on expensive imported coal.

Vaccine-preventable diseases result in over 1.5 million deaths in children under 5 annually (WHO 2015). In Peru, vaccine coverage of children under 12 months can reach as low as 44% in remote areas without access to immediate health services (MINSA 2013). Limited vaccine coverage is a multi-pronged issue, resulting from limited knowledge about and access to vaccines as well as deficits in immunization systems.We propose to design and implement a system integrating mobile devices with an electronic database of immunization histories.

Every minute a child somewhere in the world dies of malaria; and 90% of these deaths occur in Africa. Currently there is a big gap in the availability of high quality malaria diagnosis, especially at community level in African countries. In partnership with Mobile Malaria Labs (Momala), Amref Health Africa will close this gap. We will increase the capacity of peripheral laboratories and improve the accuracy in diagnosing malaria, subsequently improving appropriate treatment and drastically reducing over-consumption of anti-malarial medicines.

Pneumonia is the largest global infectious killer of children under 5 years, and mostly affects poor rural children in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) with no access to care except visits by community health workers (CHWs). A CHW detects pneumonia with an inaccurate set of physical findings that misses many cases while adding to global antibiotic resistance. We have developed a novel pneumonia diagnosis and treatment algorithm with innovative point-of-care tests to be used by CHWs.

Routine childhood immunization (RCI) in Pakistan is well below the recommended coverage of 90% with rates as low as 16% in certain regions (Pakistan DHS 2012-3). This has led to continued polio transmission, large measles outbreaks and thousands of deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases (Kazi.Bull WHO 2016). Mobile phone communication is widespread in developing countries, and has proven a potential method in directly connecting pregnant women and mothers to health services (Kharbanda. Expert Review of Vaccine 2014).

Acute respiratory infections are a leading cause of child mortality in low-resource countries. Pneumonia alone is directly responsible for the deaths of 900,000 children under-fives in the developing world annually. Early diagnosis and treatment by CHWs (Community Health Workers) in these countries could significantly reduce mortality. In the absence of radiology and blood tests the WHO recommends counting breaths to measure the respiratory rate (RR) as the diagnostic test of choice for pneumonia.

MobileVaani is a missed call technology platform for bottom-of-the-pyramid rural users. Accessible free of charge from any mobile phone, MV operates in 25 Indian districts and has 1.5 million users. TikaVaani ("vaccine voice") is a project to improve child vaccination coverage in rural Uttar Pradesh, India. It uses the MV platform for (1) behaviour change communication, (2) health worker training, and (3) community-based monitoring and use of call metadata to improve governance, transparency, and health services delivery.

This innovation seeks to use mobile technology to improve the uptake of vaccines among newborns and children under 5 in developing countries. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 109 million children received three doses of the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis vaccines in 2010, while 19.3 million children were not reached. The WHO data states that 1.7 million children under 5 die from vaccine preventable diseases due to missed appointments.