Epidemiologist http://www.mrc.gm/about-us/people/anna-roca has won two major grants recently (http://www.mrc.gm/about-us/people/anna-roca). The first from the Medical Research Council is for an intervention preventing bacterial infections in the newborn. The project named ‘Pregnanzi’ is worth £665,000 and is valid for a period of two and a half years.  The second ‘EPIcar’ is an investigation into the effects of EPI vaccines on bacterial infections and is valued approximately 110,000 Euros over 18 months.
Pregnanzi
In The Gambia and other African countries under five mortality has decreased markedly and UN Millennium Development Goal 4 has been achieved in some countries. But, as Dr Roca says, ‘Neonatal mortality has remained high, so clearly interventions for this age group are needed.’

The focus of Pregnanzi will be on preventing bacterial infections during the neonatal period by using a low-cost prophylactic intervention. The study will start soon and will be conducted at the Jammeh Foundation Clinic in Serekunda.  Dr Roca says ‘They have a very competent pre-natal care clinic.  There is also 24 hour post-natal care, as they saw that many women were returning after delivery with bleeding or sepsis.’  The MRC has a good collaborative relationship with the Jammeh Foundation Clinic, where there are other on-going studies.  And, importantly in terms of this project ‘the hospital has 4,000 deliveries per year and we need 850 participants for the study.’ Says Dr Roca.

As Dr Roca concludes ‘This study is about determining whether we can lower bacterial infection in infants. If we prove our hypothesis, we’ll need a higher scale study, probably multi-centre, to investigate the effects of the intervention on disease or mortality.’

EPIcar
A lot of work has been done at the MRC on the un-specific effects of vaccines.  For example, it has been found that young infants vaccinated against measles have lower overall mortality than non-vaccinated children (studies conducted by Peter Aaby (Bandim Health Project, Guinea Bissau), Hilton Whittle and Katie Flanagan (MRC)).

EPIcar will work with samples collected during a longitudinal study of infants as part of the baseline phase of the Sibanor vaccine trial. The project aims to evaluate the un-specific effects of EPI vaccines from a perspective of control of bacterial infections.