Science, tech & innovation for humanitarian relief

Science and tech for global health

[OXFORD]  In response to the growing Ebola crisis in West Africa, scientists in the United Kingdom and United States last week launched human trials of an Ebola vaccine candidate, and the plan is to carry out trials in Mali too within the next few weeks. 

SciDev.Net spoke to Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford and lead researcher for the UK-based trials. He told us about the exceptionally fast review process that enabled scientists to start the trials within a few weeks, the international collaboration driving the fight against this public health emergency, and his hopes that a vaccine could be available by the end of the year. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/medicine/multimedia/fast-tracking-ebola-vaccine-human-trials.html

Q&A on fast-tracking Ebola vaccine human trials

According to the WHO, bad air quality was responsible for 7 million deaths in 2012. In this interview Paulo Saldiva, dean of the department of pathology at the University of São Paulo, explains that there are no measures to protect people against air pollution, and so public health policies are vital to avoid serious consequences, particularly in large cities. He says the science needed to address the risks of air pollution is in place, but that poor countries lack the resources to implement it with solutions that work locally.

http://www.scidev.net/global/pollution/multimedia/local-science-tackle-air-pollution.html

Q&A: A call for local science to tackle air pollution

Find out how community-based drug outlets in the Philippines provide cheaper medicines and boost healthcare. 

How village pharmacies are aiding the Philippines’ poor

In this audio interview, economist Rana Roy discusses new evidence of the toll of air pollution in China and India.

Q&A: Putting a price on deaths from vehicle pollution

Public health responses to the Ebola crisis neglected to build trust among affected people, and more must be done to engage with the ‘human factor’ when disease outbreaks occur, anthropologist Heidi Larson warns in this audio interview. 

Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, says crisis response programmes must address public fears around disease. One critical lesson to emerge from the Ebola epidemic, she says, is that failing to focus on communication and trust-building with communities early on can lead to heightened fears and misinformation that jeopardises safety and helps a disease spread.

Social scientists and medical experts need to work hand-in-hand to devise responses, Larson says, because “a public health or medical expert and an anthropologist will look at the same situation and notice very different things”.

The interview was recorded at ‘Ebola – The 21st-century plague?’, a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine, United Kingdom, on 6 February. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/health/multimedia/community-trust-epidemics-ebola-audio.html


Q&A: How building community trust helps combat epidemics

Although antiretroviral drugs are not a cure, they can stop people infected with HIV from developing AIDS by keeping the amount of virus in the body low.

This audio feature explores a UK trial that used the antiretroviral drug Truvada to prevent a group of homosexual volunteers, considered at risk of contracting HIV, from doing so. Although the drug was successful in the United Kingdom, experts warn that more effort will be needed to develop targeted campaigns to administer the treatment  in regions where HIV is endemic, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.

HIV trial holds promise for preventing infection

“Syrian refugees are not dying from pneumonia, they’re dying from diabetes and heart problems”, says Jon Gunnarsson of Médecins Sans Frontières. “Seventy-seven per cent of all mortality is due to non-communicable disease.”   Gunnarson, who works with refugees in Jordan, says that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) represent one of the most urgent yet underfunded health crises facing Syrian refugees displaced by the country’s civil war.

There are 600,000 Syrian refugees registered in Jordan, 84 per cent of them living outside refugee camps. Many are afflicted by NCDs such as hypertension, heart disease, asthma, smoking-related illnesses, and diabetes — indeed the Middle East and North Africa region has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world, Gunnarsson says. These conditions are exacerbated by risk factors linked to the stress and trauma of displacement, as well as lack of access to treatment. For example, smoking and inactive lifestyles are widespread among those displaced, while high rates of depression can make treatment adherence more difficult for patients, he says.


So great is the problem, that MSF – an organisation that does not usually focus on NCDs – has been building NCD clinics and testing out new treatment programmes for refugees. Underpinning these is a ‘patient-centred model of care’, that includes health education, counselling, peer support sessions and motivational interviewing. 

In this interview, Gunnarsson, who heads up an NCD nurse team in Irbid province in northern Jordan, explains why NCD care is so effective and vital for Syrian refugees, and outlines some of the results from their work in Jordan. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/treating-diseases-killing-syrian-refugees.html


New ways to treat the diseases killing Syrian refugees

In 2002, after decades of war followed by Taliban oppression, Afghanistan’s university system was in tatters, says Osman Babury, the nation’s deputy minister of higher education, in this audio interview. Just 7,000 students were enrolled in university — and all of them male as the Taliban restricted female education. Thirteen years later, there are over 300,000 students in higher education, 50,000 of them women.

But the path to a fully functioning higher education system remains beset by challenges. Persistent conflict, political volatility and the threat of Taliban attacks — including on universities themselves — make providing higher education a struggle. 

Stress and mental health problems stemming from long-term exposure to war and oppressive regimes affect huge numbers of Afghan students. And as universities in Afghanistan and worldwide increasingly become targets for extremist attacks — the devastating Garissa attack in Kenya in April being the most recent high-profile example — giving students and staff training in how to deal with these threats becomes ever more vital, Babury says. 

In this interview, Babury discusses these and other challenges, and suggests ways to tackle them head-on.

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global conference on international education, in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/afghan-universities-violence-war-conflict.html

Building Afghan universities in the face of violence

Students in Gaza face near insurmountable barriers to university education, explains Suheil Tarazi, programme manager for the British Council in Gaza, in this audio interview. Persistent conflict, buildings destroyed by bombing, a lack of funding and equipment, a student body traumatised by years of violence and war, and the world’s lowest employment rate are just some of the devastating conditions students and teachers experience each day. 

July 8 marks a year since the beginning of the seven-week war that left nearly 2,200 people dead — over 2,100 of them Palestinians in Gaza. Like many Gazans, Tarazi says, a huge number of students and lecturers lost their homes and family members in the 2014 conflict, adding to those already traumatised and displaced.

Against this backdrop, Tarazi says scholarships to study abroad can be lifelines for students, with many going on to return home to help develop universities in Gaza. 

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global 2015 conference on international education in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/education-lifelines-palestinian-students-gaza.html

Photo credit: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan

Education lifelines for Palestinian students in Gaza

When the NGO Field Ready first arrived at a health clinic in Haiti, they found the hospital’s maternity ward dangerously short of equipment. Nurses and doctors were using makeshift tools to clamp the umbilical cords of new-born babies. So the team began printing umbilical cord clamps using 3D printing presses, trained up the staff, and this kind of printing is still in use today, long after Field Ready left the island. Rather than buying expensive equipment, which is usually imported at great cost from China and elsewhere, healthworkers can now simply print off such kit as and when they need them. 

In this audio interview, Laura James, advisor to Field Ready, which specialises in 3D printing for humanitarian relief, explains that umbilical cord clamps are just one use for this important, rapidly evolving technology. They hope to develop the capacity to create spare car parts and the more straightforward but no less vital tool, buckets – both items that are in high demand but short supply in the global south, with countries too often reliant on expensive imports.  

In time, Field Ready hope to create a global network of 3D printing technicians and designers who, through online manuals and forums, can share designs and ideas across continents and contexts. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/innovation/multimedia/3d-printing-emergency-healthcare-haiti-maternity.html


3D printing can revolutionise emergency healthcare

Hear how a Swedish social enterprise is producing innovative housing to meet the needs of the displaced. 

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, which killed more than 20 people, including UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injured many more. The United Nations has designated tomorrow as World Humanitarian Day, to recognise those caught up in humanitarian catastrophes and those who work to support them. 

In this audio interview, we talk to Johan Karlsson, head of business development at Better Shelter. This Swedish social enterprise designs safe and robust shelters for refugees across the world. Karlsson says such products are an important evolution in emergency shelter, bringing dignity and safety to refugees in some of the world’s most insecure places. At the centre of the project is the idea of democratic design. Technical testing, pilot and field trials, and feedback workshops bring refugees into the design process, ensuring their practical, social and cultural concerns are heard and integrated in the shelters’ design.

The shelters are now being used in Ethiopia, Iraq and Nepal. And they can be more than homes: through use as buildings such as health clinics, women’s centres, and children’s play spaces, they can meet the many needs of those displaced from their homes. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/refugee-shelter-redesigned.html


Refugee shelter redesigned

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 