Posted 06/12/2011. Scrub typhus is an important cause of febrile illness in Laos. Ivo Elliott and colleagues collected, identified and tested small mammals hosts and vector chigger mites for Orientia tsutsugamushi, the causative pathogen. A single pool of chiggers tested PCR positive and 16/52 (31%) of small mammals were seropositive. These are the first molecular and serological data on O. tsutsugamushi in vectors and non-human hosts from Laos.

Posted 02/12/22. PhD research from Vu Thi Ngoc Bich at OUCRU Hanoi (with NIHE, Radboud and Maastricht University) on samples from our longitudinal community cohort in Ha Nam, Vietnam, shows that frequent antibiotic exposure may push microbiota to different steady state that is less diverse but more resilient to disruption by subsequent antibiotic use.

Posted 29/11/22. Makoto Saito and colleagues evaluated the fetal safety of antimalarials in the first trimester of pregnancy. Pregnant women who were treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) in the first trimester had fewer fetal losses and congenital anomalies than quinine-treated women. Updated WHO guidelines recommend ACT, particularly artemether-lumefantrine, for all trimesters.

Posted 22/11/2022. Who owns individual-level health data collected from health research and clinical care? In this paper Phaik Yeong Cheah and Jan Piasecki argues that neither public ownership nor private ownership will allow us to resolve all the problems associated with effective, equitable, and ethical use of data.