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