Tag: Global health

“Research is very much a team effort and I see this award as a reflection of that.” – Dr Felicity Fitzgerald, 2023 Simon Newell Award winner

Dr Felicity Fitzgerald

Dr Felicity Fitzgerald (who volunteered clinically during the West African Ebola outbreak) has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Simon Newell Award for her work in Zimbabwe to improve recognition and outcomes of newborns with suspected sepsis. Dr Fitzgerald spoke to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) about her research and tips for aspiring researchers.

The Simon Newell Award Recognises an outstanding young medically qualified researcher in British paediatrics. Each year, with support from GOSH Charity and Sparks, RCPCH offer the prestigious award of £2,000 to one early independent researcher in paediatrics.

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Movement Foundations: How can digital tools help people to become more physically active?

Dr David Salman from the School of Public Health discusses how digital interventions could help people return to fitness following a period of illness.

I am a GP, researcher, and work at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust sport and exercise medicine clinic. Part of my work is to help people become more physically active – important because it is one of the few interventions that can improve health in many different ways. If we had a similar drug or intervention that reduced the risk of heart disease, diabetes, dementia, depression, risk of falls, and several cancers, then everyone would probably be on it. The problem is that almost one-third of people in the UK are not physically active enough for good health. This is partly because barriers to being physically active exist across individual and cultural factors, such as illness, pain or different conceptions of what physical activity or exercise mean; infrastructure aspects such as safety, facilities and lighting, through to national and global policy. Therefore, this wonder medicine is not equally available to all.

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Covid-19 vaccination in the UK: What does the future hold?

Covid-19 vaccination centre sign

Recently, the UK Government announced that offers of first and second Covid-19 vaccinations will come to an end after 30 June. Ahead of World Immunisation Week, Professor Azeem Majeed from the School of Public Health discusses this major change in national vaccine policy, and why it’s important to stay up to date with Covid-19 booster vaccinations.

The announcement from NHS England that first and second doses of Covid-19 vaccines will no longer be offered to adults after 30 June 2023 signifies a significant change in national vaccine policy. We will all remember the start of the Covid-19 vaccination programme in December 2020, the rapid rollout of vaccines by the NHS, and the enthusiasm for vaccination amongst most sections of the population. Vaccination curbed the impact of Covid-19, leading to large falls in hospital admissions and deaths, and allowing the government to end Covid-19 restrictions.

We are now though entering a new phase in which Covid-19 vaccination will be restricted to older people and those in medical problems that place them at higher risk of adverse outcomes such as hospitalisation and death. The very highest risk groups – such as the immunocompromised and people aged 75 years and over – have been offered booster vaccines every six months for the past two years. Other population groups – such as NHS staff, those aged 50 and over, and people with significant medical problems – have been offered annual booster vaccines.

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My day in the living lab: Could I help accelerate drug trials?

Rory-Cellan-Jones

Rory Cellan-Jones is an author and former BBC Technology Correspondent who, in 2019, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Rory discusses his visit to the ‘Living Lab’ at the UK DRI Care Research & Technology Centre – a unique mock apartment where scientists can monitor the behaviour of patients in a domestic environment.

My week started with quite a stressful day. For nearly five hours I was under the microscope, my every move watched by scientists. They made me walk up and down, rise from a chair without using my arms, open and close my hand rapidly. I spent half an hour staring at a computer screen trying to work out which shape fitted where on a grid, one of a number of cognition tests. They even made me make two cups of tea and four slices of toast.

It was tiring but it was all in the cause of science – and potentially faster drug trials. This all took place in Imperial College’s Living Lab, a room fitted out like a small flat on the ninth floor of a tower block in West London. The lab is equipped with video cameras and a series of sensors which provide data on its occupants’ activities.

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Is an H5N1 ‘bird flu’ pandemic inevitable?

The largest ever outbreak of bird flu is spilling over into mammals, including foxes and otters in the UK. Could this transmission see a jump to humans? Dr Thomas Peacock from the Department of Infectious Disease discusses.

Avian influenza virus has been featured prominently in the news again over the past few months. Headlines urge vaccine stockpiling, show images of beaches covered in dead sea birds or seals, or people in hazmat suits carrying bin bags full of dead birds or mink. Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, is another pandemic unavoidable?

We have been in this situation before, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, headlines spoke of ‘bird flu’ – H5N1 viruses ancestral to the ones currently circulating in Europe – as the inevitable coming pandemic. In fact, in 2009 an influenza pandemic did occur, but rather than the deadly H5N1 bird flu, it was caused by an obscure swine influenza virus that passed onto humans and caused the 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic.

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World AIDS Day: We have come a very long way but there is still much to do to protect those at risk

Professor Sarah Fidler

This festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of wisdom.

While HIV is no longer the death sentence that it once was, lifelong treatment is still required and there is no cure – yet. Professor Sarah Fidler from the Department of Infectious Disease discusses how a new type of HIV treatment holds promise as a longer-lasting alternative to current complex drug regimens.

Despite extraordinary political and medical advances, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, remains one of the world’s most serious public health challenges. Since its discovery in 1983 by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in France, 84 million people worldwide are estimated to have become HIV-positive and 40 million people have died from an HIV-related illness. Today, there are around 38 million people living with HIV globally, with 1.5 million new infections in 2021.

Advocacy and close collaboration between clinicians, scientists and the HIV-affected community has inspired and driven the research and drug development and access agenda. Without these close working relationships, the development of HIV treatments would have been markedly slower and many more lives would have been lost.

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Targeting both incretin receptors together for a new generation of diabetes therapies

Close up of woman's hands checking blood sugar level using glucose meter

Dr Alejandra Tomas, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, explores new and emerging incretin-based therapies for managing diabetes.

Diabetes is a disease that has reached epidemic proportions, with millions of people dying or suffering from a myriad of associated complications. Given that cases are projected to increase worldwide over the coming decades – especially in low- and middle-income countries – there is an urgent need to develop and deploy effective treatments for the disease.

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Food for thought: Experiences from Imperial’s Food Student Research Network Conference

Dr Aaron M. Lett, Director of the Food Student Research Network, providing a plenary talk and officially launching the Food Student Research Network.

Recognising the value of interdisciplinary learning, Imperial’s Food Student Research Network aims to bring together students from across the College’s faculties to enable the cross-fertilisation of ideas and research in fields relevant to food. Here, members reflect on the Network’s inaugural conference.

In September, Imperial’s Food Student Research Network hosted its first Annual Conference. Reflective of the ethos of the network, this conference was an event for students, led by students.

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How long is COVID-19 infectious? Opportunities and challenges in using real-world evidence

New York circa November 2020: Crowd of people walking on the street wearing masks during COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: blvdone / Shutterstock.com.

Providing the most comprehensive picture of COVID-19 infectiousness to date, recent research from Imperial College scientists offered new insights into how long people with COVID-19 are infectious for. Co-author, Dr Seran Hakki, outlines the challenges of collecting real-world evidence in the first-of-its-kind study.

In August, the ATACCC Study (The Assessment of Transmission and Contagiousness of COVID-19 in Contacts) published some of their findings in one of the world’s leading respiratory health journals, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Our study was the first to use real-life evidence from naturally acquired infection to assess the duration of COVID-19 infectiousness, its correlation with symptom onset, and how this affects the accuracy of lateral flow tests.

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Can we save lives by deliberately infecting people?

A person's arm being injected

In the middle of the pandemic, scientists intentionally infected healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. John Tregoning, Reader in Respiratory Infections at the Department of Infectious Disease, explains why these experiments, and the volunteers who take part in them, are critical to modern medicine.

In early March 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising-sounding set of experiments were taking place. Researchers at Imperial College London (and separately at the University of Oxford) were deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2. This was in fact the latest in a long line of controlled human infection studies – where volunteers are deliberately infected with an infectious pathogen under extremely controlled conditions.

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