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kevin-photo2This year’s ASTMH saw a number of key sessions and presentations that highlighted the exciting work being done to evaluate the performance of new pneumonia diagnostic aids at the community level.

Day one included a presentation by Dr. Michael Hawkes from the University of Alberta titled: ‘Solar powered oxygen delivery: a randomized controlled non-inferiority trial’. The presentation provided evidence for to show solar powered oxygen delivery can be an effective intervention in resource poor settings. The study was conducted in Jinja, Uganda and based on the results the project team is now planning to expand the work to another 85 health facilities in Uganda.

This was followed by Save the Children’s evaluation of the Philips ChARM device (Children’s Automated Respiratory Monitor) – an innovative and easy to use pneumonia-screening tool for low resource settings. The evaluation showed that the ChARM device is an acceptable alternate diagnostic tool for identifying fast breathing among children under five. 

On day two, Malaria Consortium’s US Representative, Madeleine Marasciulo, moderated a symposium titled ‘Key elements for improving management of pneumonia in children in resource poor settings’. The symposium was attended by over 200 people.

The event featured a presentation from Malaria Consortium’s African Technical Advisor, Dr Ebenezer Baba, ‘Progress towards universal access to pneumonia treatment’, as well as results from the pneumonia diagnostics study, presented by Pneumonia Diagnostics Programme Coordinator, Kevin Baker. The results highlighted the difficulty health workers face when counting respiratory rates and the need for better tools to support them to better detect the symptoms of pneumonia.

Following this, Kristoffer Gandrup-Marino, Chief ofInnovation at UNICEF Supply Division presented plans for the ARIDA project and the important factors to consider when developing pneumonia diagnostic trials at the community level in resource poor settings.
If the pneumonia diagnostics project showed us anything, it is the urgent need for user-friendly devices and for technological innovators to continue developing diagnostic tools for the millions of health workers who use them to count respiratory rates every day. The ARIDA trial is taking this forward, Kevin Baker said.

Finally, Dr Grant Aaron, Global Health Director at Masimo, presented ‘Scaling up Medical Oxygen and Pulse Oximetry – the case of Ethiopia’. Dr. Aaron highlighted the work being done to scale up oxygen management in Ethiopia as well as a new respiratory rate device being developed by Masimo.

On Tuesday evening an important session was held on the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health Study (PERCH). PERCH is a multi-country, comprehensive evaluation of the etiologic agents causing severe and very severe pneumonia among children 28 days to 59 months with data collected between August 2011 and January 2014, with over 9,500 cases enrolled.

It was great to see such high quality sessions on pneumonia at ASTMH this year with several of the sessions presenting important findings for the first time. Community health delivery in remote or low resource settings will surely benefit from the new diagnostic tools and study results.

By Kevin Baker

pPanel photo from the pneumonia symposiump
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