Professor Paul Turner

Contact information

Podcast Interview

Infectious diseases are prevalent in Cambodia, a country that is struggling with poor infrastructure. Streptococcus pneumoniae causes the most severe form of pneumonia and is now targeted by the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. Dr Paul Turner is studying the effect of this vaccine in field conditions in SE Asia, as well as other direct applications such as the evaluation of a new diagnostic test for Typhoid and interventions to reduce the burden of infections acquired within hospitals.

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Research groups

Paul Turner

MB BS, PhD, FRCPCH, FRCPath

Associate Professor

Senior Clinical Research Fellow
Consultant in Microbiology
Director of the Cambodia Oxford Medical Research Unit

Clinical microbiologist with a focus on paediatric infections

Paul Turner is based at the Cambodia-Oxford Medical Research Unit (COMRU), Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

His research interests include:

Antimicrobial resistance surveillance and control;
Paediatric healthcare associated infections;
Pneumococcal colonisation and disease and the impact of pneumococcal vaccines;
Utilisation of bacterial colonisation data.

His non-research work focuses on development of human and laboratory capacity for diagnostic microbiology in low-resource settings.

Key publications

Dense genomic sampling identifies highways of pneumococcal recombination
Chewapreecha C. et al, (2014), Nature Genetics, 46, 305 - 309
Improved Detection of Nasopharyngeal Cocolonization by Multiple Pneumococcal Serotypes by Use of Latex Agglutination or Molecular Serotyping by Microarray
Turner P. et al, (2011), Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 49, 1784 - 1789
Evolution of antibiotic resistance is linked to any genetic mechanism affecting bacterial duration of carriage
Lehtinen S. et al, (2017), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114, 1075 - 1080
Antimicrobial Resistance in Invasive Bacterial Infections in Hospitalized Children, Cambodia, 2007–2016
Fox-Lewis A. et al, (2018), Emerging Infectious Diseases, 24, 841 - 851

Recent publications

Boosting heritability: estimating the genetic component of phenotypic variation with multiple sample splitting
Mai TT. et al, (2021), BMC Bioinformatics, 22
Evolutionary histories and antimicrobial resistance in Shigella flexneri and Shigella sonnei in Southeast Asia
Chung The H. et al, (2021), Communications Biology, 4
Impact of delays to incubation and storage temperature on blood culture results: a multi-centre study
Ling CL. et al, (2021), BMC Infectious Diseases, 21
Improving Treatment and Outcomes for Melioidosis in Children, Northern Cambodia, 2009-2018.
Chandna A. et al, (2021), Emerg Infect Dis, 27, 1169 - 1172
Prediction of disease severity in young children presenting with acute febrile illness in resource-limited settings: a protocol for a prospective observational study.
Chandna A. et al, (2021), BMJ open, 11

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