Infectious Disease

Michael Leventhal of the Association RobotsMali in Mali will determine whether ChatGPT-4 can support curriculum development and teacher training to improve literacy in Mali, which has 65% illiteracy. The West African language Bambara is the most widely spoken language of Mali, but there is almost no literature in Bambara and few Malians can read their mother tongue. Education is provided almost entirely in French, a language most Malians do not understand, and in a cultural context foreign to Malian children.

Henrique Dias of the Instituto de Inteligencia Artificial na Saude in Brazil will determine whether AI can produce an accurate hospital discharge summary to ensure that essential information is passed to the next healthcare provider and patient care is maintained. Discharge summaries are often incomplete, unclear, or delayed in terms of their delivery due to the document construction process.

Praveen Devarsetty of the George Institute for Global Health in India will integrate an LLM into their SMARThealth Pregnancy application to enable two-way communication support for frontline health workers to improve healthcare services for pregnant and postpartum women in India. Reducing maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity is a global priority, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where information about medical conditions and pregnancy symptoms is difficult to access in simple terms and local languages.

Wyckliff Omondi from the Ministry of Health in Kenya will integrate a neglected tropical disease (NTD) surveillance program into the national blood donation program as a more cost-effective mechanism to monitor lymphatic filariasis and other endemic NTDs in Kenya. Kenya is on course to eliminate lymphatic filariasis using mass drug administration programs. Certifying regions as disease-free requires careful post-treatment assessments.

Innocent Semali of Hubert Kairuki Memorial University in Tanzania will design a more effective strategy for eliminating trachoma in the nomadic Maasai communities in Tanzania. Trachoma is a bacterial disease and a leading cause of blindness. Globally, there are around 84 million sufferers, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, the standard control strategy, which involves mass drug administration of azithromycin, eliminated trachoma from most districts. However, the strategy has largely failed in nomadic populations for unclear reasons.

Vincent Cubaka of Partners In Health in the U.S. will build robust data governance structures to enable the utilization of electronic medical records from multiple countries for research purposes to improve health. So-called FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles enhance the value of personal medical records for research, and CARE principles were developed to protect the owners of these data. However, the rigidity of these principles can create conflicts, which can make it difficult, for example, to open access to datasets across different countries.

Haroon Hafeez of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Pakistan will develop a framework for the re-use of large clinical and administrative datasets to enable comparative analysis of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in Pakistan and in Brazil, with colleagues at Fiocruz there, to improve pandemic responses and promote data-driven evidence generation in the Global South. Monitoring vaccinations across different settings is crucial for containing pandemics.

Vinicius de Araujo Oliveira of Fiocruz in Brazil will develop a framework for the re-use of large clinical and administrative datasets to enable comparative analysis of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness in Brazil and in Pakistan, with colleagues at Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre there, to improve pandemic responses and promote data-driven evidence generation in the Global South. Monitoring vaccinations across different settings is crucial for containing pandemics.

Damazo Kadengye of the African Population and Health Research Center in Kenya will establish a functional Learning Health System to promote the exploration of population health data from multiple sources to improve public health responses to infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. Utilizing the data revolution to generate new knowledge is crucial for achieving global health targets, but there is a lack of suitable tools and limited access to data from different sources.

Luc Samison of Centre d'Infectiologie Charles Mérieux - University of Antananarivo in Madagascar will support more responsive and resilient antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance systems in Madagascar and Burkina Faso by building a data science center for the electronic collection, analysis and dissemination of data. They will develop and refine data collection tools and sharing processes to promote multi-disciplinary collaborations and strengthen data governance and standards.