Category Archives: Uncategorized

Good progress on the Senuph project

The South Ethiopia Network of Universities in Public Health (SENUPH) is a collaborative initiative to enhance public health education and research capacity in southern Ethiopia.

A recent mid-term evaluation concluded, “In SENUPH II, all planned research groups were formed, including senior researchers, PhD candidates, and master’s students. Their research outputs, with a high percentage of published work by master’s graduates, highlighted the program’s effectiveness. Furthermore, collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia ensured that the research had direct implications for national health policies. “

Publications from the project can be seen here.

The picture shows PhD students from Arba Minch and Hawassa universities participating in epidemiological training courses while visiting Bergen.

Climate and Health

Dr. Taye Gari and his colleagues from Hawassa and Addis Ababa University conducted a cohort study in the Ethiopian Rift Valley, a region known for its vulnerability to drought. Their findings are particularly relevant to this context.

Climate variability, crop production, and household food security could be causally linked to women’s nutritional status, suggesting that rural people depending on rain-fed subsidence farming for crop production are vulnerable to the impact of climate variability. Government interventions such as education, membership in health insurance, and safety net programs could help mitigate the effect of climate variability. Furthermore, mitigating climate variability through improving household food security, wealth status, and educational status could reduce the stress of climate variability in the affected populations.

Taye Gari, Bethlehem Mezgebe, Mehretu Belayneh, Yonas Mersha, Bernt Lindtjorn. Effect of climate variability, crop production, and household food insecurity on malnutrition among women: A mediation analysis from a drought-prone area in Southern Ethiopia. 2024. EarthArXiv. DOI: 10.31223/X56Q6S

Improving health care for patients with diabetes and hypertension

The World Health Organization has designed a package of essential non-communicable diseases (PEN) strategies to improve the detection and management of NCDs. However, the implementation of the PEN in Ethiopia is at an early stage, and the readiness of rural primary healthcare units to implement the strategy is unknown.

We aim to determine the prevalence of undiagnosed hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and sickness associated with hypertension and diabetes among older adults. Furthermore, we shall apply the WHO-PEN-based care model for participants diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension and evaluate its effectiveness in controlling these diseases.

Recently, the NCD group published a pre-pring of the protocol; see submitted paper.

The study started, and the picture shows a teaching session of fieldworkers before the study began.

Current status of the Senuph-2 project

Three years have passed since we started the Senuph-2 project. Here is a summary of the achievements so far.

We have established seven research groups; you can read about them on this website. Altogether, 20 PhD students have started their work. Most of them are actively doing their fieldwork or laboratory work. All of the research either includes a randomised control trial or cohort studies. The persons in the research are preparing to write their first papers that they will use in their doctoral theses.

The project also supports the work of some master’s theses. These master’s degree students work in the research teams and are exposed to how a larger research group works.

We plan to hold the annual scientific conference in November 2024. This year, the meetings will be in Arba Minch. For the scientific conference, we will let each research group present its research and its implications in separate sessions. As we did in 2023, we will invite other PhD students and researchers to present their findings in these sessions.

Reanalysis of the Maltrials study

Our malaria prevention trial in Zeway was recently reanalysed. When analysing the trial results, we particularly questioned why the entomological data showed an effect of our interventions while the randomised cluster trial was negative.

In the last year, we have tried several new reanalysis methods, and we believe we had a negative trial because we needed to account for unequal community levels. In the future, we should pay much more attention to multi-level data structures.

As you may read from the paper, we postulate that visible and hidden layers could affect the analysis of such community studies. Thus, we are currently working with people familiar with remote sensing to evaluate if the distribution of, for example, maise fields plays an essential role in the variation of malaria in communities. In addition, we are trying to map the distribution of small and temporary ponds often seen as breeding sites for Anopheles arabiensis. We’re trying to use remote sensing by downloading high-resolution satellite data for our Hawassa and Arba Minch studies.

Is it time to recruit new students, master’s or PhD, with a keen interest and relevant educational background to do work on the interdisciplinary aspects of epidemiology, remote sensing and GIS?

You can read our paper by following this link,  where you will find related research papers.

Strengthening neonatal and maternal health

The maternal and neonatal research team aims to improve the quality of care for mothers and newborns within the community. The team collaborates with community health workers and health development teams, directly influencing the local health system.

The photo illustrates a training session conducted by members of the maternal and neonatal research team and health extension workers for the health development teams residing in the Gala Argiso kebele in the Sidama region of Ethiopia. These health development teams are volunteers dedicated to addressing maternal and newborn health issues at the grassroots level. Additionally, it seeks to educate mothers on self-care practices during pregnancy and postpartum and guide them on when to seek medical attention for health concerns.

The NCD group began collecting data

The non-communicable disease group has now received ethical IRB approval. Currently, they are testing their data collection tools, using both the Sidaamu Afoo, the prevailing language in the study area and Amharic, using the open-source KoBo Toolbox for data collection and storage.  This week, the team will start training data collectors and conduct pre-tests in a rural area of Sidama.