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13 Oct 2022

Webinar: Public and community engagement in health research-openings and obstacles for listening and responding

E-book launch! This e-book explores approaches taken by engagement practitioners, engagement scholars, social scientists, and researchers to promote listening and responding to community voices in research processes. It seeks to understand the challenges that obstruct meaningful integration of community voices in research design and responsiveness to expressions of needs and aspirations for change, in low-and-middle-income countries. The Research Topic draws experience from numerous majority world countries and explores multiple global health challenges and research approaches

6 FEBRUARY 2023 | 09:00 UK Time | REGISTER HERE

Public Engagement Masterclass from Wellcome Connecting Science

Duration: 3 days | Cost: £150 GBP - bursaries are available | Language: English

Suitable for: Applicants must be active researchers (PhDs students, postdoctoral researchers level or above) at a research institute or higher education institution. The course is open to researchers from all disciplines.

Public Engagement Masterclass supports researchers from all disciplines who want to embed public engagement in their research. As the world begins to recover from Covid-19, public engagement with research must reflect the big influences affecting society as well as the academic and research sectors, including misinformation, digital exclusion, and embedded prejudices and inequalities in society.

Guided by an overarching theme of Public engagement in Transforming Times the programme will include:

• Engaging different communities with research, examining contexts, partners and audiences
• Fostering diversity and inclusion and actively challenging unconscious bias and discrimination
• Embedding public engagement in research projects and grants and considering the changing opportunities from major research funders
• Evaluating public engagement, setting outcomes and measuring change
• Developing a bespoke engagement plan for your context, thinking from research team to wider institutional level

Find out more on the Wellcome Connecting Science website.

Online Short Course in Science Communication, with Stellenbosch University #Scicomm

Duration: 2 months (2-3 hours/wk) | Cost: ZAR 9000

BUILD YOUR #SCICOMM SKILLS WITH THIS ONLINE COURSE DESIGNED FOR PARTICIPANTS FROM AFRICAN COUNTRIES

The online science communication course at Stellenbosch University is designed to build expertise in strategic engagement with public audiences – an increasingly important requirement of publicly-funded research.

Participants will get to grips with theory, research trends, best practice and strategic thinking in the field, while benefiting from networking with fellow science communicators around the world. The course is also a stepping stone for young scientists who may be interested to pursue a career in the field of science communication research or practice.

Visit the website to find out the next dates, course content, costs and application procedures and read feedback from previous participants.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Where: AMREF Health Africa, Nairobi, Kenya
When: Courses starting in February, May, August, and November
Length: 2 or 4 weeks
Language: English
Suitable for: Project managers, project officers, and project assistants. As well as Quality Assurance Officers, Administrators, Human Resources and Finance Officers.
Cost: kes 70,000/$700 (for 2 weeks) or Kes 140,000/$1,400 (4 weeks)

This course gives participants a clear understanding of the process of initiating sustainable intervention projects, including planning, management and implementation.

Visit the course site for more information.

Leadership and Management in Community Development Programmes

Where: AMREF Health Africa, Nairobi, Kenya
When: Visit the website to find out about upcoming course dates
Length: 2 weeks
Language: English
Suitable for: Managers, officers, administrators involved in project implementation at a community level.
Cost: Kes 70,000 ($700)

This course gives participants a clear understanding of the process of initiating sustainable intervention projects, planning, management and implementation.

Visit the course site for more information.

 1820 Quinine

 Two French chemists isolated quinine from the cinchona bark and quinine became a treatment of reference for intermittent fever   throughout the world.

 Resistance was first reported in the 1980s and as of 2006, quinine is no longer used as a front-line treatment for malaria but is still on the WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines (MLEM)

 1934 Chloroquine

 Researched by German scientists to find substitute for quinine, these compounds belonged to a new class of antimalarials, the four-amino quinolines.

 Resistance Chloroquine-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum were first observed during 1978nin East Africa. Between 1978 and 1988, resistant parasites were reported in all countries of tropical Africa.

1972 Artemisinin

Isolated by Chinese scientists in 1972 from Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood), better known to Chinese herbalists for more than 20000 years as Qinghao.

Resistance Evidence of selection and spread of parasites partially resistant to artemisinin has now been identified in the Greater Mekong subregion (GMS) and Africa – specifically in Eritrea, Rwanda and Uganda.

1974 Mefloquine

A collaborative achievement of the US Army Medical Research and Development Command, prevented falciparum malaria when taken regularly was shown in 1974.

Resistance Resistance to mefloquine began to appear in Asia in 1985, around the time the drug became generally available.

1981 Sulfadoxine/Pyrimethamine (SP)

Initially approved for medical use in the United States in 1981. When SP was introduced in Thailand in 1967, resistance appeared that same year and spread quickly throughout South East Asia

Resistance Resistance to SP in Africa remained low until the late 1990s but since then it has spread rapidly.

Triple Artemisinin based combination therapy

New antimalarials are being developed that could take at least 4-5 years to be accessible to the communities that need them. Currently, triple artemisinin-based combination therapy, which uses antimalarials that have already been widely used is under development and can be a strategy to delay or prevent resistance and extend the useful lifetime of these drugs.

Mentions of malaria can be found in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Greek scripts as early as 3200 BC⁴. For centuries, malaria has been treated by an extract from the bark of the Cinchona tree found in South America.²

For over 2500 years the idea that malaria fevers were caused by miasmas rising from swamps persisted and it is widely held that the word malaria comes from medieval Italian “mal'aria” meaning spoiled air. Likewise, French word "paludisme" comes from the Latin word "palus," which means the sickness related to swamps. The Greek word for this illness, "elonosia," also means "the sickness from swamps”⁵.

In 1880, French doctor Alphonse Laveran was the first to identify the parasite seen under a microscope as the cause of malaria.⁶ In 1897, Sir Ronald Ross discovered the malaria parasite in a mosquito that had  fed on a malaria patient, confirming the role of Anopheles mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria.¹