Posted 17/01/2020. Malaria is no longer a common cause of febrile illness in many regions of the tropics. Yoel Lubell and colleagues consider the costs and benefits of multiplex malaria/CRP tests that are now commercially available in terms of (i) the improved health outcomes for patients with bacterial illnesses; (ii) the costs of antimicrobial resistance averted; or (iii) the economic benefits of better management of remaining malaria cases and shorter malaria elimination campaigns. They conclude that a multiplexed malaria/CRP test could be highly cost-effective and utilize the well-established funding and distribution systems already in place for malaria RDTs.

Posted 14/01/2020. Vu Thi Ngoc Bich and colleagues analyse the antibiotic resistance gene profiles among humans, animals, and their food and water in a rural Vietnamese community. Colistin resistance genes are predominantly found in both human and animal faeces, and a higher positive proportion of carbapenemase is reported – encoding genes among water and food samples when compared to human and animal faeces. This work is a collaboration between OUCRU and Radboudumc, Maastricht University in the Netherlands and NIHE in Vietnam.

Posted 10/01/2020. Our ethnography aimed to describe Nairobi’s inpatient newborn wards and the busy lives of the nurses who work there. They work long hours with little supervision in ill-designed wards, staffed by far too few nurses given the pressing need. Under these difficult conditions, the collective model of nursing that develops reduces nurses’ exposure to stress and anxiety. Jacob McKnight and colleagues describe how these coping methods have implications for the quality of care and limit the potential for a patient-centred approach.