On Tues 6 June 2017, researchers vaccinated volunteers and began Mahidol University\u2019s study of the malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS01. This is the first study in Asia of the vaccine, an advanced product that has received regulatory approval in Europe.
It has been maintained for decades that quinine is the safest drug for treatment of malaria in the first trimester of pregnancy. In the largest analysis of data from Thailand and Africa, artemisinins are reported to be at least as safe as quinine. This will simplify treatment protocols worldwide.
5 June 2017, Bangkok (Thailand) \u2013 Doing a rapid test for G6PD deficiency before prescribing the antimalarial drug primaquine to P. vivax malaria patients could be a cost-effective way to improve thousands of lives, say researchers in a study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Following the recognition in New Year\u2019s Honours for his services to tropical medicine and global health, on 19 May 2017 Professor Sir Nicholas White, Professor of Tropical Medicine at Oxford and Mahidol University Thailand, Fellow of St John's College, and Chairman of the Wellcome Trust's South East Asian Research Units was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George by the Prince of Wales. The investiture took place at Buckingham Palace, London, UK.
24 May 2017, Bangkok \u2013 This April and May, the targeted malaria elimination (TME) study in Laos\u2019 final prevalence survey evaluated new tools to detect asymptomatic malaria. These included new rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) that may be similar in sensitivity to a PCR performed on dried blood spots and reading machines that fire a laser at RDTs and use a thermal camera to detect faint positive results that would be beyond the range of the human eye.
Thailand and SE Asia\u2019s first Pint of Science Festival kicked Pint-of-Science1 off on Mon 15 May with a look at Killer Bugs: Disease, Detection and Destruction and an enthusiastic reception from over 50 attendees that included scientists from MORU and other institutions, business people with a background in science and students.
A key focus of MORU is building scientific research capacity in Thailand and SE and South Asia. One way we do this is by hosting students in a world-class research environment. In this video, you\u2019ll hear from some of our current students about why living and studying in SE Asia and at MORU is such a great experience.
MORU\u2019s Lao PDR targeted malaria elimination (TME) team recently installed 8 hand pumps to provide safe drinking water in 4 villages in Nong District, Savannakhet Province after villagers requested the pumps in return for participating in a TME project.
Village Drama Against Malaria broadcast live on Facebook a malaria awareness and engagement performance by villagers in Phnom Dambong village, Pailin Province. Over 300 villagers and local authorities attended the fun, lively, sometimes raucous performance of music, karaoke, short health talks, games and drama.
The first ever Pint of Science Festival in Thailand (and the first in South East Asia) will be held on the 15th to 17th May, 2017. Come and join us at FabCafe Bangkok to hear about exciting science, from cave paintings to leprosy, epidemics to genetics.
The Faculty of Tropical Medicine (FTM), Mahidol University, Thailand hosted a Congratulations party to honour Professor Sir Nicholas J. White, FRS, OBE on the occasion of his receiving Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George from the United Kingdom for services to Tropical Medicine and Global Health.
A lineage of multidrug resistant P. falciparum malaria has widely spread and is now established in parts of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, causing high treatment failure rates for the main falciparum malaria medicines, artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs)
In the largest study of its kind, a team of researchers led by MORU and WWARN in Bangkok developed a pharmacokinetic model that enabled a revised dose regimen to safely treat all malaria patients including young children with dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP), a widely used antimalarial and a first-line treatment against malaria recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Professor Nicholas White, OBE, Professor of Tropical Medicine at Oxford and Mahidol University, Thailand, Fellow of St John's College, and Chairman of the Wellcome Trust's South East Asian Research Units, is appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to tropical medicine and global health.
Prof Paul Newton, Director of LOMWRU and Head of the Medicine Quality Group at the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory IDDO, explains the history of falsified medicines and highlights what needs to be done to avert a problem that threatens us all.
In a first, scientists used computer simulations to identify the vaccines most likely to be effective against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the most common cause of infant severe pneumonia worldwide.
This week marks the opening of a series of performances of Fishy Clouds, a MORU collaboration with innovative Bangkok-based B-floor Theatre group. Produced following a 6-month WT-funded research residency at MORU, Fishy Clouds is a 40-45 minute puppet theatre performance that focuses on antimicrobial resistance and the ethics of research with children. It is part of MORU's Public Engagement activities to make science more accessible to a wider public including children and young people.
Training local Karen and Burman women as skilled birth attendants in refugee settings resulted in no adverse perinatal outcomes and many positive outcomes such as a drop in stillbirths and infant deaths and more babies being born in clinics rather than at home, says a new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
Multidrug-resistant bacterial infections cause more than 19,000 excess deaths a year in Thailand alone, according to a study published today in eLife Sciences Publications. In a first for Thailand, the study systematically examined microbiology laboratory and hospital databases from nine public hospitals in Northeast Thailand and compared them to Thailand\u2019s national death registry to estimate that 19,122 deaths in Thailand in 2010 were excess deaths caused by multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.
On Thur 21 July, the University of Health Sciences, Ministry of Health in collaboration with LOMWRU held the first Vientiane Science Caf\u00e9 event in Laos. More than 50 students and staff of the Faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy, Dentistry, Nursing Sciences, Medical Technology, Basic Sciences, and Public Health attended the two hour-long event.
We are delighted to announce that several MORU Network colleagues were honoured in the recent University of Oxford Recognition of Distinction rounds. Clockwise from top left: Joel Tarning was awarded the title of Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Lisa White Professor of Modelling and Epidemiology. Stuart Blacksell, Susanna Dunachie, Paul Turner, Richard Maude, Frank Smithuis and Phaik Yeong Cheah were each awarded the title of Associate Professor.
Last week, the Village Drama Against Malaria initiative held its first performance in O Treng (Reed River), a remote rural Cambodian village that suffers from malaria. Over 200 people, more than half the village, attended the performance, which featured five village singers and primary school kids dressed as mosquitoes singing a song about malaria.
The rapid decline in effectiveness of a widely used anti-malaria drug treatment on the Thailand-Myanmar border is linked to the increasing prevalence of specific mutations in the malaria parasite itself, according to a paper published in The Clinical infectious Disease Journal.
New and unexpected health threats have emerged in Asia that could weigh on the world's fastest growing and most dynamic region. Diseases associated with obesity and smoking are rising, and will cause tens of millions of deaths from heart and lung disease and cancer in coming decades. But alongside these lifestyle-associated conditions, the old foe of infectious disease is reemerging and threatens to cause an even greater health and economic disaster.
No one knows exactly why resistance to malaria drugs always emerges first in this remote western province of Cambodia, nestled in the Cardamom Mountains. \u201cThe reasons are as much social as biological,\u201d says malariologist Tom Peto, who is here in this dusty, unremarkable-looking town battling the latest threat to global malaria control: multiple drug\u2013resistant (MDR) malaria.
The Tracking Resistance to Artemisinin Collaboration II (TRACII) study has begun recruitment, with about 180 subjects enrolled to date in 12 sites in seven countries in Asia and Africa, researchers announced at the second TRACII investigators\u2019 meeting held 7 March in Bangkok.
Dr Joel Tarning from MORU discusses his New England Journal of Medicine editorial on treating malaria in pregnancy, outlining new evidence on the effectiveness of artemisinin-combination therapies in pregnant women with malaria.
Artemisinins, the most effective antimalarials available, should be endorsed in the first trimester of pregnancy to ensure optimal treatment of falciparum malaria in pregnant women, reports a paper published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Melioidosis, a difficult to diagnose deadly bacterial disease, is likely to be present in many more countries than previously thought, reports a paper published online today in the journal Nature Microbiology. The study predicts that melioidosis is present in 79 countries, including 34 that have never reported the disease.
On 14 Dec, Mr Gilles Garachon, the French Ambassador to Thailand, arrived at Mae Sot in Thailand to present France\u2019s highest award, l'Ordre National de la L\u00e9gion d\u2019honneur, to Professor Fran\u00e7ois Nosten, Head of MORU\u2019s Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU). The award is in recognition of Professsor Nosten's work over three decades fighting malaria.
Although the Wang Pha clinic was established to treat malaria, it hasn't had a malaria case at all in several days. Now, patients come with other ailments or to visit the maternity ward. \"When no one is worried, that's when we have to worry,\" said professor Francois Nosten, director of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, which includes Wang Pha and four other clinics along the Thai-Myanmar border.
In the past few months, the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU) has begun a campaign to make pregnant Karen women and their husbands aware of the importance of pre-conceptual folate to prevent neural tube defects in newborns.
The inaugural competition for this prize is a Student Poster Competition, which will be held at MORU Bangkok, between 11am-2pm on Monday 30th November 2015 in the Similan Room. Niklas was a great advocate of student activity, and supervised numerous students as part of his role as Head of Pharmacology.
The Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU) led Malaria Elimination Task Force has undertaken mass drug administration campaigns in Eastern Karen State, Myanmar in areas with a high sub microscopic Plasmodium falciparum parasite prevalence.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has approved a three-year grant that will lead to an expansion of the pharmacometric research group within MORU\u2019s Department of Clinical Pharmacology.
The European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences (EUFEPS) today awarded the Giorgio Segr\u00e9 Prize to Professor Joel Tarning for his scientific research work on the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of antimalarial drugs in vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women and young children.
Fearing that drug resistant malaria will reach Africa, Prof Fran\u00e7ois Nosten and his team are among those scientists who are scrambling to stop it while they still can. Drug resistance to artemisinin has been steadily increasing in Southeast Asia. Having emerged in Cambodia in 2007, it since has been recorded in Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. Artemisinin is the last remaining effective drug against the resistant falciparum strain, and there are no suitable replacements yet.
An unconventional clinical trial design might have advantages over classical trials for testing treatments for Ebola virus disease (EVD), suggests a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The work of an international team led by John Whitehead of Lancaster University, UK and Ben Cooper (Oxford University, UK, and Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), Bangkok, Thailand) provides much-needed data to inform a debate on the scientific and ethical justification for non-randomized EVD trials that has taken place in the editorial pages of a number of medical journals in past months.
Bangkok / Oxford (UK), 20 February 2015 - Resistance to the antimalarial drug artemisinin is established in Myanmar and has reached within 25km of the Indian border, a study published today in Lancet Infectious Diseases reports. Artemisinin resistance threatens to follow the same historical trajectory from Southeast Asia to the Indian subcontinent as seen in the past with other antimalarial medicines.
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