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\n \n\n \n6 March 2019
\n \n \n \nLorenz Von Seidlein tells SciDev.Net that mass drug administration as \u201cpresumptive treatment\u201d to clear the parasite reservoir was carried out in eight villages spread across Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam. By the third month, the prevalence of P. falciparum had decreased by 92 % in those villages. Over the subsequent nine months, P. falciparum infections returned but stayed well below baseline levels, showing that MDA can stop transmission of falciparum malaria and reduce its prevalence in SE Asia, where resistance to artemisinin has hampered elimination efforts.
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\n \n\n \n1 March 2019
\n \n \n \nWorking closely with the University of British Columbia (UBC)'s Support Program to Advance Research Capacity (SPARC), MORU Malaria Researcher Dr Katherine Plewes was recently awarded a 3-year, C$971,551 grant for her study on Evaluating the renoprotective effect of acetaminophen in pediatric severe falciparum malaria: A randomized controlled trial.
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\n \n\n \n1 March 2019
\n \n \n \nIDDO launched a new global scientific collaboration dedicated to schistosomiasis and STHs with TDR (the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases). This aims to expand data re-use and collaboration and accelerate better treatment and control of these diseases, which affect more than a billion people globally.
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\n \n\n \n12 February 2019
\n \n \n \nOn 24-25 Jan 2019, investigators met in Bangkok to launch the Developing Triple Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (DeTACT) Project. Led by MORU and funded by UKaid and the UK Department for International Development (DfID), DeTACT is a large, 14 site trial in 8 African and 5 Asian countries that will study the efficacy, safety and tolerability of two Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapy (TACT) combinations, using combinations of existing antimalarial drugs.
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\n \n\n \n8 February 2019
\n \n \n \nThe International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infections Consortium (ISARIC) has been awarded \u00a34.5 million to accelerate clinical research to prevent illness and deaths from epidemic infectious diseases. ISARIC is a world-wide, grass-roots consortium of clinical research networks, working together on epidemic infections such as pandemic influenza, Ebola, Lassa fever, and plague.
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\n \n\n \n5 February 2019
\n \n \n \nA new project at KEMRI Wellcome aims to bring high throughput pathogen sequencing and predictive models in East Africa. GeMVI plans to engage health authorities and institutes, identify priority questions and fund 20 Research Fellows on locally relevant projects. GeMVI will transfer sequencing technologies, share bioinformatic methods and develop modelling capacity, as well as generate new understanding through predictive modelling and virus sequence data.
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\n \n\n \n1 February 2019
\n \n \n \nIn this background report for the Pathways to Prosperity Commission, Chris Paton and Naomi Muinga describe the implementation of the new OpenMRS-based system called Afya (Swahili for \u2018health\u2019) Electronic Health Management System in Machakos County in Kenya. They assess the challenges associated with implementation, and suggest some recommendations for rolling out digital methods to keep clinical records in developing countries.
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\n \n\n \n18 January 2019
\n \n \n \nA recent WWARN individual patient meta-analysis has gathered 18 published and unpublished studies from Africa and Asia to explore the relationships between identified Kelch 13 mutant alleles and delayed parasite clearance. The study results show one P. falciparum specific mutant and 20 pfk13 propeller region mutant alleles are strongly associated with the slow clearance phenotype, including 15 mutations that have not been confirmed before. It was reassuring that no pfk13 alleles associated with slow parasite clearance were observed in the parasites from African studies gathered between 2000-2017.
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\n \n\n \n16 January 2019
\n \n \n \nMalaria causes nearly half a million deaths worldwide every year. Ninety percent of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where poor infrastructure limits delivery of drugs. But now there is worry that those drugs are losing effectiveness as disease strains become resistant. PBS News Hour special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Cambodia, where scientists are researching and tracking new outbreaks.
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\n \n\n \n16 January 2019
\n \n \n \nDoctors in Northern Cambodia are trialling a new drug combination therapy in a bid to stop the spread of drug resistant strains of malaria.
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\n \n\n \n20 November 2018
\n \n \n \nProgress against malaria has stalled, and the disease remains a significant threat to billions of people despite the expensive, decades-long efforts to contain it. In an encouraging development, MORU reported complete success in curing hundreds of patients in Southeast Asia with new three-drug combinations mixing fast-acting artemisinin with two longer-lasting drugs. It it hoped that triple therapy should become the standard for malaria treatment.
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\n \n\n \n9 November 2018
\n \n \n \nA systematic review analyses the results of 177 trials conducted between 1982 and 2016, including 18,436 patients who underwent electrocardiographic evaluation during malaria clinical trials. Nick White and colleagues found that serious cardiovascular side effects, which include sudden cardiac death, are very rare in the treatment of malaria with quinoline antimalarials. The work emphasises the importance of continued pharmacovigilance with the increasing use of quinoline antimalarials in mass treatment strategies such as intermittent preventative treatment and mass drug administration.
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\n \n\n \n7 November 2018
\n \n \n \nThe incidence of malaria has continued to drop dramatically in remote rural villages in Myanmar after community workers trained only to detect and treat malaria began providing basic health care as well as malaria services, researchers affiliated with MOCRU, our Myanmar-Oxford Clinical Research Unit, have said.
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\n \n\n \n24 October 2018
\n \n \n \nThe incidence of malaria cases continued to drop dramatically in rural and remote Myanmar villages after community workers trained only to detect and treat malaria began providing basic health care as well as malaria services. Adding the health services to malaria control benefitted the villagers access to health and improved malaria services \u2013 paving the way for malaria elimination.
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\n \n\n \n17 October 2018
\n \n \n \nProfessor Faith Osier's TED talk, accepted in April 2018, is now published as one of few by the TED Fellows Talks. The malaria vaccine was invented more than a century ago, yet each year hundreds of thousands of people still die from the disease. How can we improve this vital vaccine? In this informative talk, Faith shows how she combines cutting-edge technology with century-old insights in the hopes of creating a new vaccine that would eradicate malaria once and for all.
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\n \n\n \n28 September 2018
\n \n \n \nIn this Science blog, field researchers, Dr Giacomo Zanello, Dr Marco Haenssgen, Ms Nutcha Charoenboon and Mr Jeffrey Lienert explain the importance of continuing to improve survey research techniques when working in rural areas of developing countries.
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\n \n\n \n12 September 2018
\n \n \n \nDr Myo Maung Maung Swe and Htet Htet Aung from our MOCRU unit in Myanmar were awarded grants by the International Society for Infectious Diseases and Wellcome. Myo Maung will study antibiotics use and antimicrobial resistance public awareness in Myanmar; Htet Htet will conduct a study on Ethical challenges when offering pregnant women with Hepatitis B short course treatment to prevent transmission.
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\n \n\n \n4 September 2018
\n \n \n \nA team of researchers led by Yoel Lubell at MORU and IDDO used data from the USA and Thailand to link the consumption of antibiotics with the direct and indirect costs of treating patients for five drug-resistant bacterial infections.
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\n \n\n \n21 August 2018
\n \n \n \nThe Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City is participating in a project to reduce antibiotic resistance on farms in Asia by educating farmers. Juan Carrique-Mas of the Clinical Research Unit said: \u201cWe're improving the knowledge base of farmers and vets rather than a ban on antibiotics, which would be unlikely to be complied with.\u201d
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\n \n\n \n21 August 2018
\n \n \n \nThe Antibiotics and Activity Spaces project is a survey of 4,800 villagers in Thailand and Lao PDR to better understand how people access healthcare and whether there are simple early warning indicators to detect 'problematic' antibiotic use. Marco J Haenssgen and colleagues recently hosted a photography exhibition in Bangkok on rare and vivid narratives of healing in Northern Thailand.
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