Urban Zoo Team-Breaking the barriers

Oct 31, 2016 | A4NH, Blog, Epidemiology, Latest news, Urban Zoo Project

Urban Zoo Team-Breaking the barriers

Managing a large multidisciplinary research team is a challenging task, especially when the teams are based in different organisations that are far apart from each other. This is the situation that Urban Zoonoses project is currently in. The 99 Household Study involves sampling 99 different households in different parts of Nairobi. Primary data and samples are collected by both veterinarians and medics based at ILRI, after which samples are sent to University of Nairobi, ILRI and the Kenya Medical Research Institute laboratories. Isolates from these laboratories are then sent  to Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool for further analysis and full genomic sequencing.

journal-club-presentation

The urban zoo team during a journal club presentation

Proper planning and efficient communication has been the key to ensuring that everything is well coordinated. Team leaders (management or PI’s) from all the collaborating institutions hold fort-nightly teleconferences to update, consult and agree on a unified way of moving forward. It is a common practice for staff to communicate through emails, phone calls, skype and one on one talks with each other. The group has a “WhatsApp group chat” that is used to share updates/progress including photos of both the labs and fieldwork. It is also the easiest and simplest way of sharing information with the entire group. Our active website www.zoonotic-diseases.org and the quarterly newsletters, publications and scientific conference presentations are some of the effective means used to ensure that the public is informed of the projects progress and findings.

Staff development and mentoring of young talents, is an area where the project has excelled with several Kenyan staff having either completed or ongoing with their Masters studies in the different collaborating Universities; University of Edinburgh, University of Liverpool, Royal Veterinary College at the University of London. In addition, five MSc students from the University of Nairobi, and six from Moi University through the Field Epidemiology Training program have been supported to undertake their research projects. The project has also attracted a number of European, American and Asian graduate fellows who joined to either gain experience or undertake research projects.

team-building-session

The urban zoo field team on a team building session

Team building sessions, write-shops, journal clubs and support to present scientific findings in both National and International Conferences coupled with inspiration and guidance from our dedicated Project Investigators, post-doctoral fellows and management are some of the ways that have helped in forming a united and dedicated team. Looking back, we all feel like one family, really privileged to be part of this big success!

Article written by  James Akoko and Victoria Kyallo  (Field Coordinator and Project Manager, respectively)

Co PI’s Letter: Planning and Policy Thread

Oct 31, 2016 | A4NH, Blog, FSZ, News, PI&Co-PI letters, Urban Zoo Project, Zoonotic Diseases

Co PI’s Letter: Planning and Policy Thread

Prof. Julio D. Davila

Prof. Julio D. Davila

Our projects policy team aims to examine the links between social-environmental and spatial conditions and the microbial diversity that people are exposed to in urban and peri-urban areas. It also seeks to outline the institutional and planning context in which zoonotic diseases develop in Nairobi, and how this is shaped by spatial fragmentation.

In cooperation with Slums Dweller International-Kenya and APHRC, the Team previously collected data through a variety of means, including co-producing knowledge with local communities. In partnership with IIED, we have produced working papers, conference papers and policy briefs to showcase the results, with some currently being submitted to journals. Under the guidance of Prof. Muki Haklay and Dr. Sohel Ahmed, UCL post-graduate student Maayan Ashkenazi wrote a fascinating MRes dissertation on the different livestock keeping strategies by women in the low-income settlement of Mathare. She found that these not only vary according to the women’s economic abilities but along multi-scalar social and social characteristics arising from living in different villages within Mathare.

In our work we have also sought to build on the decade-long efforts of APHRC in gathering a rich array of primary information on health in informal settlements. We also found that not much attention has been paid in the literature to the planning, policy and structural issues that would appear to play a significant role in reproducing and entrenching endemic pathogenic environmental conditions, conditions that make disease (including zoonoses) prevalent in these settlements. Part of our work has involved outlining the institutions, actors, norms, practices, interactions, their (in) adequacy and complexities around the provision of infrastructure (water, sanitation and solid waste management) that promotes and perpetuates such pathogenic conditions in many parts of Nairobi. We have also sought to examine how legal, policy and institutional realities have influenced urban and peri-urban land use in Nairobi, and how such practices and interventions help shape livestock keeping and farming activities.

To that effect, earlier this year Dr. Sohel Ahmed conducted a series of interviews with research scholars, planners and policy makers in Nairobi. The results suggest that urban and peri-urban agriculture, including livestock keeping, are still not considered a legitimate urban land use neither in the Nairobi Master Plan and land-use maps, nor in the daily practice of local government officials. As a result of antagonistic views towards pro-poor informal farming from planners and other powerful actors, we argue that urban agriculture, particularly livestock keeping in Nairobi and its periphery, is unlikely to survive the effects of the rapid increases in land prices seen in Nairobi in recent years. This is partly the result of a lack of reliable investment alternatives, but also the result of inadequate or non-existent land-value capture mechanisms and an effective regulatory framework that guides growth and allows price increases to be re-invested in much needed infrastructure that benefits the city as a whole. Rapid urbanisation is accompanied by continued land speculation, rapid appearance of multi-storey buildings and conversion of large tracks of agricultural land to urban uses. As tracts of land become sub-divided into smaller plots, there is an observable shift to zero-grazing forms of livestock keeping (e.g. poultry). Hence, livestock and their material flows (i.e. meat, dairy and poultry) are continuously moving further away from central Nairobi.

Despite the 2010 constitutional reform allowing Nairobi County to prepare its own plan and control development under an ‘integrated development planning’ framework, in reality the County has little say over where new infra-structure, particularly electricity and roads, should be located. Water, roads and electricity are controlled by para-statals, thus taking away from the County government the power to decide on crucial components of its current and future growth. The County’s chronic institutional and resource deficiencies mean that the city will continue to allocate resources in such a way that mostly benefits a minority of residents, thus entrenching an east-west socio-economic divide. The inadequate and unsafe provision of water, sanitation and solid waste management has severe public health consequences for residents of poorer areas. Poor infrastructure places some people and their livestock at increasing risk of communicable diseases, and helps reproduce the conditions leading to chronic expo-sure to higher microbial diversity.

Julio D Dávila is Professor of Urban Policy and International Development, and Director of the Development Planning Unit, University College London.

Endemic infectious diseases: the next 15 years

Aug 24, 2016 | Blog, Emerging Diseases, Endemic Diseases, Latest news

Endemic infectious diseases: the next 15 years

I have recently returned from the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. It was, as many have noted, a landmark event: a chance to celebrate the remarkable success of the HIV response over the past 15 years.

But it was also a stark wake-up call. Despite the tangible results – which include millions of lives saved – it is increasingly clear that to achieve the goal of ending the AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030, the world needs to take the fight several steps further.

Accelerating progress across all infectious diseases

Dr Ren Minghui, Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases WHO

Dr Ren Minghui, Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases
WHO

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed last September at the United Nations in New York, offer an ample opportunity to accelerate progress across all infectious diseases. The focus on equity, health systems strengthening, universal health coverage, and multi-sectoral action will transform the way we tackle these diseases.

The SDGs build on the momentum generated during the Millennium Development Goals era, and on lessons learned during the first 15 years of this century. And they recognize that while the global response has significantly reduced the infectious disease burden and saved over 50 million lives, much more needs to be done.

In 2000, who would have thought that by 2015 the world could get 17 million people in low- and middle-income countries on antiretroviral treatment, reduce malaria mortality rates by 60% and cut tuberculosis (TB) deaths by 47%? Who would have predicted that, within the space of 15 years, it could bring down the number of guinea worm infections from over 75 000 to just 22? But it did.

What we have to do now is maintain our resolve and further intensify our efforts.

“More than anything, the next 5 years should be about creating solid foundations for ending the infectious disease epidemics everywhere. This is not a moment to lift our foot off the accelerator. These diseases are known for returning with a vengeance, if we ever slow down.”

Dr Ren Minghui, WHO Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases

Infectious diseases continue to have far-reaching impacts on people’s lives. In some of the poorest countries of the world, they continue to devastate economies and cripple health systems. Progress remains uneven and millions are not being reached with prevention measures and treatment.

From the outset, the fight against infectious diseases has been dogged by social, legal and economic barriers, and funding gaps have been significant. These are a major reason why HIV, TB, malaria, viral hepatitis and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) still kill more than 4 million people every year.

Globally, 480 000 people develop multi-drug resistant TB each year, and drug resistance is starting to complicate the fight against HIV and malaria, as well. A coordinated effort to tackle this challenge – under the umbrella of the WHO global action plan on antimicrobial resistance – will be critical to success.

Global strategies on infectious diseases

To help countries deliver on their pledge to ‘end the epidemics’ by 2030, the World Health Assembly has adopted global strategies on HIV, TB, and malaria. This year, it passed the world’s first-ever global hepatitis strategy and set the first global hepatitis targets. Since 2012, a WHO roadmap has been available to guide global efforts on NTDs which affect over a billion people.

The strategies are backed up by a set of evidence-based guidance documents to help countries design and implement their own plans. They emphasize opportunities to maximize the impact of prevention, treatment and care services, and to mitigate the impact of biological challenges, such as drug and insecticide resistance, and climate change.

At the same time, WHO is working to help countries move closer to universal health coverage, by ensuring that all people have access to the health services they need, without being thrown into poverty as a result.

As well as establishing robust health financing systems, this means building up a qualified workforce and investing in efforts to improve the quality of treatments, diagnostics and prevention tools. It means assuring adequate supplies of affordable, safe and effective health products and putting an end to stock-outs. And it means joining up the dots: a greater integration of services, as we are already seeing in many places.

More than anything, the next 5 years should be about creating solid foundations for ending the infectious disease epidemics everywhere. This is not a moment to lift our foot off the accelerator. These diseases are known for returning with a vengeance, if we ever slow down.

This post was authored by Dr. Ren Mingui (WHO Assistant Director-General for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases) originally appeared as a commentary on the World Health Organisation website on 17th August 2016. Available at: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/commentaries/2016/Endemic-infectious-diseases-next-15-years/en/

10th World Rabies Day, September 28th

Jun 17, 2016 | Archived events

September 28th, 2016 will be the 10th annual World Rabies Day. There are several exciting plans in the pipeline for this milestone in the event’s history and – of course – we look forward to hearing your plans too.

Theme
As you may know, one of the outcomes from the Global Meeting in December was a target of 2030 for the elimination of human deaths from canine rabies (a goal that will save the lives of countless animals too). Building on this outcome, the theme for World Rabies Day 2016 is
Rabies: Educate. Vaccinate. Eliminate.

Resources
You can find free downloadable logos in multiple languages and branding (like the image at the top of this email) for your documents and materials here

There are ideas, checklists and guidelines to organising an event here

And improving knowledge either to support your event or as part of your event has never been so easy with our free online courses, available here

Rounded Rectangle: World Rabies Day 2016 - Event Resources

A new way to register
Registering an activity takes five minutes and multiplies the impact of what you’re doing by making sure people outside your immediate network know about it.

As previously, you can register on our website here

Or – new for 2016 – you can register by creating a Facebook event. (Instructions on how to create a Facebook event are here – you’ll need a Facebook account to do this.)
If you opt to register via Facebook please make sure you

  1. Invite @Global Alliance for Rabies Control to your event (so Facebook notify us and we can include your event in the total number of events), and
  2. Tag the event #WorldRabiesDay (so other people can find you and to build momentum behind the hashtag).

We will then register the event on our website and send you the link to your event page. This process aims to make sure all events are accounted for and shown on the event map (and only shown once!).

Questions?
Regrettably, we cannot financially support individual events, but we are here to offer guidance, suggestions and connections where we can, so please get in touch if you have any questions.

Stay tuned…
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, there is more in the pipeline and we will be in touch soon with updates. We look forward to sharing them with you – and we look forward to sharing your World Rabies Day events with the world.

Let’s keep pushing for elimination by 2030 by making #WorldRabiesDay 2016 the best so far.

Warm regards,
Liz Davidson
Global Community Engagement – GARC

P.S. If you already know what you’re doing, event registration is now open

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