Friday Newsletter
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Dear Centre Leaders,
In today's newsletter:INDEPTH team participates in Harvard climate change workshops
  • ABACUS qualitative analysi ABACUS qualitative analysis workshop held in South Africa
  • Pneumococcal carriage in children under five years in Uganda
  • Decreasing child mortality in N.Western Burkina Faso workshop held in South Africa
1. ABACUS qualitative analysis workshop held in South Africa
ABACUS workshop participants at Witts School of Public Health.
INDEPTH’s project on community-based antibiotic access and consumption (ABACUS) convened a workshop from 2 - 4 May 2017 to 2017 at the Witts School of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The aim of the workshop was to create a unified approach to the analysis of the qualitative data, to develop clear timelines for analysis and write up, and to devise a means of producing a cross-site analysis.
 
There were 17 participants for the workshop including Peter Asiedu from the INDEPTH Resource and Training Centre in Accra is the project coordinator for Africa. The ABACUS Project assesses and compares community-based antibiotic access and consumption, and the factors that underpin them, in six countries in Africa and Asia.
Details on ABACUS read here
News from Centres
 1. Iganga Mayuge HDSS:
     Pneumococcal carriage in children under five years in Uganda

 
Dr Dan Kajungu, Centre Leader for Iganga Mayuge.
Pneumonia is the major cause of death in children globally, with more than 900,000 deaths annually in children under five years of age. Streptococcus pneumoniae causes most deaths, most often in the form of community acquired pneumonia. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) are currently being implemented in many low-income countries. PCVs decrease vaccine-type pneumococcal carriage, a prerequisite for invasive pneumococcal disease, and thereby affects pneumococcal disease and transmission. In Uganda, PCV was launched in 2014, but baseline data is lacking for pneumococcal serotypes in carriage.
 
This research published in the paper titled "Pneumococcal carriage in children under five years in Uganda-Will present pneumococcal conjugate vaccines be appropriate?" aimed to study pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage and serotype distribution in children under 5 years of age prior to PCV introduction in Uganda. It was found out that about half of circulating pneumococcal serotypes in carriage in the Ugandan under-five population studied was covered by available PCVs.Read more
2. Nouna HDSS:
  Decreasing child mortality, spatial clustering and decreasing disparity in N.Western Burkina Faso

Dr Ali Sie, Centre Leader for Nouna.

Within relatively small areas, there exist high spatial variations of mortality between villages. In rural Burkina Faso, with data from 1993 to 1998, clusters of particularly high child mortality were identified in the population of the Nouna Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), a member of the INDEPTH Network. In this paper, researchers report child mortality with respect to temporal trends, spatial clustering and disparity in this HDSS from 1993 to 2012. Poisson regression was used to describe village-specific child mortality rates and time trends in mortality. The spatial scan statistic was used to identify villages or village clusters with higher child mortality. Clustering of mortality in the area is still present, but not as strong as before. The disparity of child mortality between villages has decreased. The decrease occurred in the context of an overall halving of child mortality in the rural area of Nouna HDSS between 1993 and 2012. Extrapolated to the Millennium Development Goals target period 1990–2015, this yields an estimated reduction of 54%, which is not too far off the aim of a two-thirds reduction.Read more
Policy Engagement and Communications