Overlap between vaccination and infection during Jan-June 2021

Maciek Boni Global Health

Hi #epitwitter, sorry to pile on with bad news, but we’re not as immune as we think, and it’s not just #Omicron‘s immune escape. In southern New England, it turns out that ~27% of vaccines were given to previously infected individuals. Pre-print below. 1/ medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Estimates are that 34% of vaccines in Rhode Island, 28% in Massachusetts, and 25% in …

Maciek Boni Drug Resistance, Malaria

Hi #epitwitter SARSCoV2 attack rate in MA thru Feb 28 is estimated at 24.6% (95% CI: 22.4%-26.3%). It’s difficult to pin this down closer than 3 to 4 percentage points, as there are still several model fits that work well. Underreporting is still at about 3 for Massachusetts. 1/ The Jan 31 estimates had a higher underreporting rate (2.9 to …

Demographics and life history of poultry on smallholder farms in Vietnam

Maciek Boni Economic Epidemiology

Python the language and python the reptile, together at last in this veterinary epidemiology publication on the demographics of smallholder domestic poultry farms in #SEAsia. There is substantial overlap of flocks, species, and ages: they are not run as all-in-all-out-systems. 1/ For those interested in #mathematicalmodeling of #avianinfluenza, including circulation of #H5N1 in poultry flocks, diagram below gives you the …

Drug-resistance management results presented at two symposia at MIM in Senegal

Maciek Boni Drug Resistance, Global Health, Malaria

We presented some of our most recent modeling results on how to effectively manage resistance to multiple artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) at two symposia at the 7th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Malaria Conference.  One symposium was run by our partners at Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and a second one was run by Guilin Pharmaceuticals who are awaiting …

Workshop on Influenza Epidemiology and Evolution in Vietnam

Maciek Boni Influenza

From March 4 to 6 2018, we ran a workshop in Hanoi — together with Vietnam’s National Institutes for Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) — on the epidemiology and evolution of influenza virus in Vietnam. The workshop summarized the past 10 years of OUCRU-led and NIHE-led studies, whose aim was to determine the patterns of persistence, seasonality, and attack rates of …

Influenza-like illness forecast for Ho Chi Minh City in 2018

Maciek Boni Influenza

Since the summer of 2009, we have been running an mHealth reporting study in Ho Chi Minh City on influenza-like illness (ILI).   Over 70 community clinics have participated in this project, and about 53,000 ILI reports have been contributed over the years.   You can read about the study set-up and the real-time epidemiological tracking that this network enables …

Nguyen Thi Duy Nhat passes her Oxford DPhil viva

Maciek Boni Influenza

Congratulations to Nhat on passing her DPhil viva on November 27! Nhat started working at OUCRU in the summer of 2012, enrolled in Oxford’s DPhil program in October 2013, and has been working on several major questions in influenza seroepidemiology since then.   Nhat analyzed a collection of >20,000 antibody titers from the general population in southern Vietnam.   Nhat …

Postdoctoral positions open in malaria microsimulation

Maciek Boni Malaria

The Boni Lab in the Department of Biology at The Pennsylvania State University is recruiting highly-motivated postdoctoral scholars to work on several key public health questions using large-scale individual-based malaria simulations.   Our lab’s research interests can be seen here and here.   Positions can begin anytime in 2017. Our lab is based at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics …

Nguyen Ha Thao Vy passes her Masters defense

Maciek Boni Influenza

Congratulations to Vy for passing her Masters thesis defense today!   Vy’s thesis focused on the molecular epidemiology and seroepidemiology of influenza in Ho Chi Minh City, and it represented more than three years of serological and molecular lab work that Vy led, together with Tran Thi Nhu Thao and Huynh Thi Phuong of OUCRU.   Vy’s main results were …

Tran Thi Thanh Phuong passes her Oxford DPhil viva

Maciek Boni Economic Epidemiology, Malaria

Congratulations to Phuong on passing her DPhil viva on December 14! Phuong started working at OUCRU as a health economist in 2012, enrolled in Oxford’s DPhil program, and has been working on two major health economics questions for her DPhil studies.   Phuong looked at the costs and benefits of delayed versus immediate antiretroviral therapy of HIV+ tuberculosis-meningitis patients in …

Stacy Todd passes her PhD viva

Maciek Boni Influenza

Congratulations to Stacy Todd on passing her PhD viva today! At OUCRU Vietnam for 2.5 years, Stacy ran a large observational study on influenza antibody profiles in flu-positive and flu-negative patients.   Stacy examined the relationships between these profiles and influenza susceptibility, computed antibody waning rates for patients recently infected with influenza, and determined how these waning rates influenced estimates …

Real-time ILI reporting project to start up in Da Nang

Maciek Boni Influenza

On Saturday May 28, the OUCRU modeling team visited Da Nang to meet with a group of doctors who are interested in setting up a real-time ILI reporting study similar to the study that has been running in Ho Chi Minh City since 2009.   Hannah Clapham and Nguyen Thi Le Thanh visited a number of clinics in Da Nang …

Interrupted feeding analysis presented at WHO meeting

Maciek Boni Malaria, Recombination

On December 10-11, the WHO Technical Expert Group (TEG) on Drug Efficacy and Response met in Geneva to make recommendations on the appropriate response to the spread of artemisinin resistance, and to look at the effects of future malaria control strategies such as seasonal malaria chemoprophylaxis, triple combination therapies, and the deployment of multiple first-line therapies (MFT). The results of …

Multiple first-line artemisinin combination therapies

Maciek Boni Malaria

One of the earliest mathematical modeling questions our group began working concerned how we should best deploy antimalarial therapies to delay the onset of drug resistance for as long as possible.   This is a “resistance management” problem, and you can find some of the earliest publications on this topic here and here.   This work was led by Tran …

OUCRU’s first two mathematical modeling PhDs

Maciek Boni Influenza, Malaria

Congratulations to Dao Nguyen Vinh (left) and Tran Dang Nguyen (right) who both passed their PhD vivas this month. Vinh and Nguyen were the first two students in OUCRU’s mathematical modeling group, and they helped build the group up to its current state today, with seven people working on influenza and four on malaria. Vinh’s thesis was titled Influenza in …

Collaboration with Erasmus Medical Center

Maciek Boni Influenza

This week, we visited the Erasmus Medical Center to work with our longtime collaborators, Marion Koopmans’ research group, on a range of seroepidemiological studies that we are running together.   Our collaboration started in 2010 when we noticed that our large general-population serum collections in Vietnam and the high-throughput protein microarray technology developed by Marion’s group were a good match …

Twenty years of artemisinin use in Vietnam

Maciek Boni Malaria

In the late 1980s, Vietnam experienced a large malaria resurgence resulting from the spread of chloroquine resistance and a strained public health system suffering from slow economic growth during the post-war rebuilding effort.   In 1991 and 1992 there were more than a million clinical malaria cases per year in Vietnam, with 4503 deaths in 1991 and 2669 deaths in …

WHO influenza phylogenetics workshop

Maciek Boni Influenza

In September 2014, OUCRU organized and taught the “Workshop on Phylogenetic Analysis for Evolution of Influenza Viruses” for the WHO Vietnam Country Office and Vietnam’s National Institutes for Hygiene and Epidemiology.   The courses were taught by Ha Minh Lam, Maia Rabaa, and Maciej Boni, and participants came from Vietnam’s national research institutes and provincial public health agencies. The workshop …

Launch of www.ili.vn

Maciek Boni Influenza

In the summer of 2009, during the first months of the 2009 influenza pandemic, we launched a community study on influenza-like illness (ILI) in Ho Chi Minh City.   About a dozen private clinics were enrolled initially, and they sent us daily reports on influenza-like illness cases by standard mobile phone SMS text messages.   The study was designed for …