Reflections on The Epidemiological Transition

Damaris Nelima, a PhD student at GLUK, offers her reflections on a recent conference in Kenya and her presentation of SHARE-funded research.

The epidemiological transition

I recently attended the inaugural joint meeting of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (RSTMH) that was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi on the 7th and 8th June, 2016. The two day conference was an awesome opportunity for me as an upcoming scientist to meet and interact with established and upcoming scientists from across the globe spanning from as far as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Senegal, Nigeria, Malawi, South Africa, Gambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Cameroon, the United Kingdom and even India.

The conference helped open my eyes to the many areas of research where gaps exist, and which organizations are funding research work in the health sector (including health systems). Based on the theme the "epidemiological transition", many research leaders in various disciplines around health, communicable and non-communicable diseases came together to present their work, which resulted from many years of research. Upcoming investigators also had an opportunity to showcase their research work in both poster and oral presentations. The presentations ranged from research in malaria, WASH, childhood malnutrition, HIV, worms, communicable and non-communicable diseases, among many others diseases conditions. There were various stakeholders who organised the meeting include the Wellcome Trust, RSTMH, African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the University of Oxford, through whom the 31 young scientists earned scholarships from.

The presentation

After presenting results of the WASH disparities study from Phase 1 of SHARE, I went on to introduce the current phase of the ongoing SHARE-supported study "The effect of a novel early childhood hygiene intervention on enteric infections and growth faltering in low-income informal settlements of Kisumu, Kenya a cluster randomized controlled trial".

The meeting participants seemed really enthusiastic about the study results and asked me questions including how we measured wealth among the households and what we thought were the contributing factors to the high contamination of weaning food among this population. I informed themthat we were currently doing a formative study to answer the question on contributing factors to weaning food contamination, though the community dialogue sessions had suggested that the caregivers were the major source of contamination. The question on wealth assessment was also tackled.

Reflections

I felt the conference was of a high profile, well organised and the oral and poster presentations were of international standards. We had a great opportunity of networking, sharing, learning and interacting with other researchers of high profile creating greater outcomes for me and other young researchers present at the conference.