Friday Newsletter
View this email in your browser
Dear Centre Leaders,
In today's newsletter:
  • Short course announcement: Epidemiological evaluation of vaccines: efficacy, safety, policy
  • Call for a Grants writing workshop by the Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF)
  • Agincourt HDSS:Practical guide for preparing HDSS data for analysis
  • Matlab HDSS: Counselling increased exclusive breastfeeding duration by 60 days
1. Short course announcement: Epidemiological evaluation of vaccines: efficacy, safety, policy
Epidemiological research has become an important tool in assessing vaccine protection. Although there are several courses specialising in vaccinology, there remains a gap in teaching about advanced epidemiological tools for vaccine evaluation. This course fills that gap, providing an in-depth
training on current methods used in the evaluation of vaccine efficiency, safety and policy. It aims to address immunization issues in high-, middle- and low-income countries.

The course is relevant to public health professionals and field researchers with a strong interest in vaccine efficacy, safety and policy impact. The course is intensive and a good command of the English language is essential. A knowledge of computers and a basic knowledge of Word for Windows and
Excel is also essential. Read more:
 
2. Call for a Grants writing workshop by the Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF)
Africa Research Excellence fund (AREF) is seeking applicants for its 2nd Essential Grants Writing Skills Workshop to be held for 3-days in Dakar, Senegal, 22 – 24 May 2017. The Workshop aim is to enable talented early-career health- and health-related researchers to build skills for grants/proposal/application writing and increase their competitiveness in securing international, regional and national funding.

Applications are sought from:
• Post-doctoral scientist from all health-related disciplines (PhD awarded within 4 years by 1 July 2017) actively engaged in any field of health research;
• Medical doctors with a relevant Master’s degree and at least 3-years and not more than 6-years of active research experience in clinical or other relevant fields.

Please see details of the call here.
News from Centres
1. Agincourt HDSS
Practical guide for preparing HDSS data for analysis
Sulaimon Afolabi has published a youtube video tutorial titled, “Practical Guide for Preparing
Health & Demographic Surveillance System Data for Analysis using Stata”.  This is done with him having the the following study objectives in mind. That is, for the would-be user of Health & Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) data:
o    To have a basic understanding of health & demographic surveillance system;
o    To learn relevant commands in stata;
o    To convert HDSS data from wide to long format;
o    To combine or merge two or more tables coming from the HDSS database;
o    To check the dataset for inconsistencies;
o    To build data quality matrix;
o    To prepare the HDSS data for event history and other kind of analyses and
o    To Perform event history analyses.
 Read more
2. Matlab HDSS:
Counselling increased exclusive breastfeeding duration by 60 days
Health worker offering counseling services.
In Matlab, Bangladesh, over three thousand pregnant women received either focused breastfeeding counselling sessions or more general health promotion messages. Results revealed that focused counselling increased exclusive breastfeeding by 60 days compared to standard healthcare messages. This indicates that these focused counseling programmes can effectively work to prolong exclusive breastfeeding duration and promote healthy child development in resource-deprived settings.

According to the WHO, exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond. In fact the Lancet states scaling up of breastfeeding to a near universal level could prevent 823,000 annual deaths in children younger than 5 years and 20,000 annual deaths  from breast cancer. Despite breastfeeding promotional activities over the last two decades in Bangladesh, the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding at four to five months of age has remained relatively small. Read more
Policy Engagement and Communications