Resources

This issue of Directions in Global Health features five PATH projects: our collaboration with the World Health Organization on the Meningitis Vaccine Project; prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission in Ukraine; a small grants program that is catalyzing behavior change in Africa; the Inter-Act project, which is training truck drivers to slow the HIV epidemic in India; and an evaluation of neonatal resuscitators.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop a preventive malaria vaccine. While they have successfully demonstrated that such a vaccine is possible, many challenges continue to impede progress on the road to an effective malaria vaccine. As a result, the Malaria Vaccine Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization (WHO), coordinated by the WHO Initiative for Vaccine Research, called for a collective effort to explore and address the challenges. This effort resulted in the Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap process.

This training aid was developed as part of Training Health Workers in the Management of Sharps Waste. The aid includes a graphical representation of the equipment needed to help protect waste handlers and incinerators during the collection, treatment, and final disposal of health care waste.

We describe the functional elements of a diagnostic instrument and disposable enteric card system under development that rapidly identifies and differentiates Shigella, E. coli, Campylobacter, and Salmonella in stool samples. These elements, currently realized as microfluidic subcircuits on individual cards, are: (1) pathogen capture and lysing, (2) nucleic acid capture, (3) on-chip rapid PCR, and (4) lateral flow detection of amplicons. Presented at the Solid State Sensor, Actuator and Microsystems Workshop, June 4, 2006; Hilton Head Island, SC.