The best treatment for childhood malnutrition might seem obvious: more, and more nutritious, food. And the standard approach is indeed just that. Over the years, formulae for ready-to-use supplementary food (rusf)—bars and packets of paste intended for moderate cases and made from rice, lentils, sugar, soya oil and milk powder—and similar therapeutic food (rutf), a nut-based treatment for more severe instances, have been developed. These work. But Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of the awkwardly named icddr,b, a research institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and his team think they have come up with something better.

Nuhu amin is a medical researcher at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh. Later this month one of his colleagues will dig into a pit latrine in Cox’s Bazar, a refugee settlement in Bangladesh where 900,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims live. A sample will be extracted, refrigerated, and sent on a 12-hour bus journey to a laboratory in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

A study conducted by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) found the sub-variant BA.5 is spreading rapidly in the country.

Dr. Firdausi Qadri is a Bangladeshi scientist specializing in infectious diseases such as cholera. In 2021 she was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Asian Nobel Prize, for her work.

A study, one of the first to examine how “geoengineering” techniques might affect health, found that an artificial planetary sunshade could make the deadly mosquito-borne disease spread more in hot, lowland regions including West Africa, parts of South Asia and the Amazon basin.

Concerns over antibiotic resistance

Meanwhile at a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, Jobayer Chisti struggles to save a one-month-old from pneumonia caused by drug-resistant Klebsiella. This bug would be remarkable in Britain or America, where most cases of bacterial pneumonia are easily cured by antibiotics. But 77% of the infections treated by Dr Chisti’s team between 2014 and 2017 involved drug-resistant bacteria.

NHK featured scientist Dr. Firdausi Qadri from Bangladesh who has been working for four decades to prevent and eradicate infectious diseases plaguing the developing world, such as cholera and typhoid.

Top Bangladeshi immunologist Dr. Firdausi Qadri, who recently received Roman Magsaysay Award, said better sanitation and awareness were necessary to curb the recurrence of deadly cholera outbreaks.

Maternal and Child Health Division (MCHD) of icddr,b has developed a web-based online platform to provide virtual mental health counselling services to both health care providers and Covid-19 patients. Under this initiative, until now, 1,693 Covid-19 patients and 1,443 healthcare workers have received counselling services in the last four months. This counselling service is currently operational in 16 districts of the country. Through this web-based platform, subscribers can register and schedule appointments with the help of icddr,b field staff.

In Bangladesh, about four out of five people 60 years and older suffer from chronic diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, depression, and dementia, according to a study of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, known also as icddr, b.

The study – the first of its kind to combine genome sequencing and mobile phone data – has found a direct link between mass migration from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh (an area of high infection), and the spread of coronavirus to the rest of the country after a stay-at-home order was announced during the nation’s first wave of infection in March 2020.

The study, conducted by the Stop TB Partnership and health research institute icddr,b, compared chest X-ray readings made by three certified radiologists in Dhaka with those done by five AI algorithms. The readings were then measured against the results of patients’ nucleic acid amplification tests, which were employed as the reference standard for TB diagnosis.

Firdausi Qadri, 70, was one of five recipients of the Ramon Magsaysay Award -- named after a Filipino president killed in a plane crash -- for her "life-long devotion to the scientific profession" and "untiring contributions to vaccine development".

Resistance to antibiotics is common and often deadly among children with pneumonia in Bangladesh, according to a new study coauthored by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) with colleagues at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (abbreviated as icddr,b). This study, which appears in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, offers an early warning that a pandemic of potentially deadly antibiotic resistance is under way and could spread around the globe.

One of the world’s leading global health research institutes, the International Centre for Diarrhoel Disease Research, Bangladesh, known as icddr,b, based in Dhaka, has collaborated on the project by helping to line up 1,500 people to participate in the trial. The app was developed in Bangla, the native language of the region.

In recent weeks, the medical team at the UNICEF/icddr,b SARI ITC has been observing a decreasing number of patients seeking care in their dedicated isolation facility.

“There is big demand for the Chinese vaccines,” says Firdausi Qadri, an immunologist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, in Dhaka.

Friendly gut bacteria have emerged as an invaluable ally in the war against malnutrition after a research study in Bangladesh showed that bacteria-targeting food supplements were more effective than standard nutritional supplements in improving the health of undernourished children.

icddr,b observed a dramatic change in the distribution of SARS-CoV-2 variants when the South African variant appeared. It became the most prevalent variant during the third week of March 2021 by replacing other variants. Most remarkably, the South African variant occupied 81% of the variants in the fourth week of March 2021. Our findings warrant continuous monitoring of genetic variations of SARS-CoV-2, which is crucial for vaccine effectiveness and patients management.