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
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
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
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
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
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
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 …
Sandra Goldlust selected as a winner in the New Voices in Global Health initiative
Last month, Sandra Goldlust was featured in the New Voices in Global Health Program (NVGH) at the 2016 World Health Summit in Berlin for her research on malaria control in Vietnam that she conducted at OUCRU over the summer of 2014. She is one of 10 winners representing 7 different countries selected for the 2016 NVGH award, which seeks …
Stacy Todd passes her PhD viva
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 …
eLife selects outstanding papers for 2013
In a bid to shake up the luxury journal cabal, the journal eLife was launched in late 2012 to give researchers a high-quality open-access publishing option that, in addition to having a world-class editorial board, also supports early career scientists and provides open and rigorous peer review. For the second half of 2013, the academic editors of eLife chose five …
The battle against drug resistance just got tougher
Do we have any leverage against drug-resistant organisms? Our post on the Wellcome Trust blog explores the importance of the “fitness cost of drug resistance”. Two studies in 2013 gave notice that our normal expectation — that drug-resistant populations will revert to sensitivity when the selective environment is removed — doesn’t hold true for all pathogens. In mouse and …
Phylogeography: does subsampling solve sampling bias?
A few years ago, we were asked by Vietnam’s National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology to help analyze their influenza sequence data. The initial question on everyone’s mind was “where does Vietnam’s influenza come from?”, but it became clear pretty quickly that flu viruses can come from anywhere. The global phylogeography of influenza had already been described by a few …
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