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Outbreaks seemed to come out of nowhere. The disease would spread quickly and then disappear as suddenly as it came. With the Nipah virus came encephalitis — swelling of the brain — and its symptoms: fever, headache and sometimes even coma. The patients also often suffered from respiratory disease, leading to coughing, vomiting and difficulty breathing.
"Nipah is terrifying, unusually terrifying," says Dr. Stephen Luby, currently a professor of medicine at Stanford University, who was in charge of the outbreak investigation for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). He says it's terrifying, in part, because the virus is so deadly in people. Also, the outbreaks are tightly clustered. "And so the people who are sick know each other," he says. "And because of this, it is a clear community crisis."
El estudio nuevo de vacuna oral contra polio, participado y financiado por la Fundación de Bill&Melinda Gates fue desarrollado por los científicos de Bangladés y fue ejecutado por el Centro Internacional de Investigación de Diarrea de Bangladés ICDDR,B, los Centro de Control y Prevención de Enfermedades de los EEUU CDC y el Instituto Internacional de Vacuna en Seúl bajo una coordinación.
In a new study conducted in rural Bangladesh, researchers found that areas with high levels of groundwater arsenic contamination that children drink regularly have a greater prevalence of antibiotic resistance compared to areas with lower contamination levels.
In a study run between 2013 and 2015, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh (ICCDRB) concluded that many pregnant women in the country had been consuming “excessive amounts” of the spice in the hope of boosting their health, with 31 per cent of those surveyed found to have “dangerous levels” of lead in their blood.
The International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh hospital, where the cholera treatment was pioneered and which played a key role in the development of the vaccine, saw a record number of cholera patients in March and April this year.
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.
“I am thrilled to be a part of the initiative, I am confident that our efforts in testing newer tools for vector surveillance and pathogen detection will eventually help save lives in Europe and elsewhere,” says Dr Mohammad Shafiul Alam, Scientist at icddr,b (formerly International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh).
New research cautions that such a radical attempt to cool the planet, often touted as a win for health, may push up the malaria risk in some countries, even if it decreases disease transmission elsewhere.
SCIENTISTS CONDUCTED PIONEERING RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND HOW SOLAR RADIATION MANAGEMENT (SRM) GEOENGINEERING COULD AFFECT SOME OF THE WORLD’S POOREST AND MOST VULNERABLE REGIONS.
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.