New grants/funding

Katie Glass is involved in a consultancy bid to the Commonwealth Department of Health to model future laboratory testing demand for SARS-CoV-2 in Australia.  She’s also involved in the wastewater testing grant led by Aparna Lal.

Outreach and engagement

Sam helped to redesign the REDCap databases for ACT Health.

New staff

Amy Parry has joined the MAE team to support student supervision one day a week.

Student news

An MAE alumni and student survey re: involvement in COVID-19 response is being submitted to HREC this week.

Other news

Sam has submitted a paper to EID titled “Clinical characteristics for first fifty non-China COVID-19 cases in Vietnam”. This is with ASEAN MAE student Hgoc-Ahn and NCLE Vietnam COVID-19 epi team leader.

The COVID-19 KAP survey was approved by HREC and is live this week.

Papers accepted/published:

1. McClure A, Glass K. (2020) Some simple rules for estimating reproduction numbers in the presence of reservoir exposure or imported cases.  Journal of Theoretical Biology (in press, accepted April 2020).
2. Wangdi K, Xu Z, Kurscheid J, Lal A, Suwannatrai AT, Namgay R, Glass K, Gray DJ, Clements ACA. (2020) A spatio-temporal analysis to identify the drivers of malaria transmission in Bhutan. Scientific Reports (in press, accepted April 2020).

Progress on research projects

The Timor-Leste malnutrition and enteric pathogens pilot study has completed the third visits for birth cohort babies. The fourth visit is postponed until the second half of 2020 (TBC) due to COVID-19. Hospital recruitment is continuing with support from the PULSA study (STRONG-TL team). The project has a new local research manager, Antoniho Gusmao, who commenced in March. There are challenges getting lab and study supplies into Dili currently, but DFAT and STRONG-TL are assisting. Sam and Ben are drafting a concept note for ACIAR with a focus on infection, malnutrition and food safety.

WHO TB and Disability review: the team have responded to comments from WPRO and have some additional work to complete for the manuscript.