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…is a major public health challenge in Bangladesh. About 45 million residents are at risk because of arsenic in their drinking water. Micronutrient selenium (Se)-deficient soils lead to less nutritious local foods. Selenium deficiency exacerbates the toxic burden incurred by arsenic exposure. Solution Soil from Saskatchewan is rich in selenium, meaning food crops grown in…is a problem were identified, and questionnaires were developed to assess the socioeconomic and health status of potential participants in the clinical feeding trial. Plans were developed for a trial involving 200 individuals (family groups) in each of the high- and low-selenium treatment groups. A pilot study was conducted to ensure that the families could…and Monitoring Board at icddr,b. The lentil dietary intervention trial began and will span 12 months, since different families began their lentil diets over a five-month period.  This staggered design was necessary to make the sample collections and health monitoring, feasible. The project team is seeking additional funding to scale up the original proposal and to pursue research questions that have arisen from their findings.

…not effective against multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and TB associated with HIV, and require long courses of therapy at high cost. Solution The goal of this project was to conduct a clinical trial to confirm or refute earlier published findings that suggested Immunoxel lozenges, given with TB treatment, improve patient outcomes. Immunoxel is a low-cost, multi-herbal…revealed that Immunoxel lozenges produced the clearance of TB bacilli in 65.9% of treated patients, versus 28.8% in the control or placebo group – a highly statistically significant difference. In addition, two important advantages of the approach, which must be emphasized, were revealed. First, the time to bacterial clearance was just one month – lightning-fast, compared to the up to two years required to treat MDR-TB patients. Second, Immunoxel appears to have an equally potent effect regardless of gravity of the disease, meaning that drug-sensitive TB…difficult-to-treat resistant strains responded to treatment in the same manner. Knowledge of the project has been disseminated in conferences and publications. The project team will be applying for Phase II Transition To Scale funding to help with initiating the commercialization process. The team feels that, within three years, commercialization of Immunoxel as an immunomodulating supplement,…

…treated with only the current gold standard treatment of malaria. Adjunctive therapies, aimed at modifying the pathophysiological processes of malaria infection, have been investigated as a way to improve outcomes, albeit with limited success to date. Solution The objective of this project was to assess and design a therapeutic strategy that would protect the brain from neurological damage in CM cases. Because PPARγ agonist drugs have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties, the team explored adding…that had participated in an earlier randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial of rosiglitazone adjunctive therapy. Outcome Results showed that rosiglitazone therapy resulted in improved survival and long-term neurocognitive performance in experimental models of CM, and was associated with the induction of neuroprotective pathways. Compared to anti-malarial therapy alone, rosiglitazone adjunctive therapy administered to mice at the onset…

With funding from Grand Challenges Canada, ayzh aims to touch the lives of millions of mothers and newborns over three years by providing portable and affordable clean home birth kits.ayzh’s “janma Clean Birth Kit” contains all the essential tools required to ensure safe and sterile conditions during a home birth, as recommended by the World Health Organization. The $2 kit includes a cord clamp,…selling over 250,000 kits, to reach its goal of providing 600,000 people with kits across India. The renewed funding will help expand distribution networks, increase production, and develop new kits for newborns and new moms.Led by SDG Pioneer Zubaida Bai, ayzh is dedicated to improving maternal health and reducing infant mortality, while also supporting the livelihoods of women across India.With the push to have mothers deliver in facilities, care providers are struggling to keep up with the demand for their services, often resulting in unsanitary birth environments. ayzh’s portable and affordable kits aim to buttress a struggling supply chain and help reduce maternal and newborn…

While there are government-run programs in urban centers, to now rural kids in Columbia have had available only a home-based daycare system run by women with little if any formal training.Providing an integrated, two-stage intervention for children from 6 months to 5 years old is the idea behind of a project led by Raquel Bernal and Ximena Peña of Colombia’s Universidad de los…at Deprived Pre-School Children in Rural Colombia" and it is a Transition-to-Scale grant.In the first stage, facilitators of existing family (home-visiting) services for pregnant women and children up to 30 months old will be trained to promote effective mothering, including nutrition, child development, and interaction with the child.In the second stage, local mothers running community nurseries will receive 160 hours of training in topics…

Vietnamese researchers point to eight major risks to optimal early childhood brain development around the time of birth in resource-constrained settings: intrauterine growth restriction; stunting; iron deficiency anaemia; iodine deficiency; unresponsive caregiving; insufficient cognitive stimulation; maternal mental health problems, and exposure to family violence.These risks interact: the poorest women who have experienced intimate partner violence…common mental disorders during pregnancy are less likely to participate in essential preventive healthcare, including the use of iodized salt to prevent iodine deficiency and taking iron supplements to counter anaemia.Risks continue in early infancy, both for mom and baby: a third of mothers have common mental disorders, 22% of infants are moderately or severely anaemic and 7.4% are stunted. Six-month-old infants of mothers with antenatal common mental disorders have infant cognitive development scores on average significantly lower than infants of mothers without common mental disorders in pregnancy.To date, interventions in these settings have focused on one or at most two of these risks,…

There is growing evidence demonstrating that non-specialist providers (NSPs)—individuals with no formal training in mental healthcare—can effectively deliver brief psychological treatments for depression and other common mental health problems in a wide range of contexts. Dr. Daisy Singla (PI) and her colleagues (Vikram Patel and John Naslund at Harvard Medical School; Abhijit Nadkarni and Anant Bhan at Sangath) have developed a measurement-based peer supervision tool for front-line NSPs. In collaboration with technology partner Dimagi, the tool will be digitized and embedded within the EMPOWER platform, to support NSP-delivered care in global health. The EMPOWER platform provides support for treatment providers to deliver psychological treatments , by facilitating measurement-based, peer supervision to ensure quality…

Issue Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death in the world, being responsible for a third of all fatalities. Coronary heart disease (CHD) accounts for the greatest proportion of CVDs, with atherosclerosis and obesity both being risk factors. Conventional methods for controlling abnormal lipid metabolism involve controlling dietary intake of fats or treatment with cholesterol-reducing drugs, such as statins. However, dietary change is often ineffective and drugs have been associated with unwanted side effects, meaning alternative means to prevent and/or treat atherosclerotic and metabolic disease are needed. Solution The goal of this project was to conduct an efficacy study of V6, a proprietary oral formulation…randomized into V6 (N=121) and placebo (N=119) arms and received one tablet of V6 or placebo daily for 30 days. Outcome Results produced in the V6 trials support the immune nature of seemingly unrelated metabolic diseases, such as obesity, atherosclerosis, diabetes and even hypertension. The magnitude of clinical response to V6 in this and other trials was comparable to the results obtained in clinical trials of cholesterol and obesity drugs, but without adverse side-effects. Practically every endpoint evaluated showed V6 had a statistically significant advantage over placebo. However, the effect of V6 was less prominent than in prior Thai studies, which were two or three months long and had a higher…

BRAC Uganda will partner with Lulu Lab to pilot and customize “Lulu’s journey”, an edutainment gamification app for comprehensive sexuality education for adolescent girls and boys and women in Uganda. The app will be introduced to 50 BRAC Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents (ELA) clubs which currently provide SRHR education and livelihood skills to adolescent …

…The most common opportunistic infection in HIV-infected individuals is tuberculosis (TB). Severely immunocompromised individuals have higher mortality risk than the average TB patient and have the most to gain from rapid diagnosis of TB and immediate treatment. Currently, rapid detection of TB in such patients can be achieved at the point-of-care within just 30 minutes using…flow assay. However, technical difficulties in generating LAM aptamer made them focus instead on the use of antibodies against LAM and monoclonal antibodies raised against a biomarker for extra-pulmonary TB (EPTB), interferon gamma (IFNγ). Outcome While the team did not develop a working prototype as intended, they did manage to optimize several components that together…