Infectious Disease

Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea that annually kills 500,000 children under age five and hospitalizes millions more. India's Achira Labs is creating a fabric-based chip that, when integrated into disposable diapers, will help detect and signal the infectious virus quickly and safely. We will develop a fabric based immunoassay diagnostic chip for rapid, qualitative identification and detection of rotavirus that can be integrated into disposable diapers to ease the collection and detection of virus in watery stool samples.

Acute diarrhoeal disease is the second-leading cause of death in young children. Many researchers, including us at McMaster University and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, have been working on developing better and faster ways to diagnose these infections, but the impact of these novel enteric diagnostics has not yet been formally measured. We will conduct a clinical trial in Botswana to determine how many young children's lives can be saved by the implementation of these new technologies.

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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.

Access to affordable and quality medicine remains an important global issue. Despite government measures, retail mark-up ranges from 5 to 355%. The main reason for this disparity is price information asymmetry, especially in far-flung areas. Furthermore, there are a number of products which over-claim to have therapeutic benefits. Unregistered and dubious products still haunt the stores. PTTT is an IT application that will make drug prices and FDA status available to the public via smartphone and will open a direct line from the consumer to the government.

Barcodes for improved child vaccination and family nutrition is a new approach by University of Nairobi innovators to address pockets of under-vaccination among children under-5 in rural Kenya. This novel "seed voucher for vaccination" is expected to increase uptake of immunization services while stimulating food production on small farms.