Associated organisationsCenter for Tropical Diseases and Global Health (Catholic University of Bukavu) · Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health · London School of Hygiene & Tropical MedicineEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£4.8M
PeriodJan 2024 — Jan 2029
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
In the city of Uvira, Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers are tracking thousands of suspected cholera cases to measure how well oral cholera vaccines actually work up to eight years after a person receives them. Cholera kills tens of thousands of people each year, mostly in places with poor water and sanitation. Global health officials need to know whether a single vaccination campaign protects people for years, or whether booster doses are essential. Current evidence is thin, especially for adults and for people who have already had cholera once. This study will produce hard numbers on vaccine effectiveness by age, number of doses, and prior infection history. It will also model how many deaths and infections the vaccination campaign prevented across the entire community. For policy makers at the World Health Organization and national ministries of health, these figures are the difference between recommending a one-off campaign and committing to repeated, costly vaccination rounds. The results will directly shape cholera vaccine stockpiling and deployment strategies for years to come.
View original technical description
We will leverage a robust cholera research platform in the city of Uvira, Democratic Republic of Congo to estimate the effectiveness and impact of a cholera vaccination program, providing critical inputs for local and global policy decisions. Learning from cholera research in Uvira since 2016, we aim to improve vaccine research quality, by continuing systematic detection and recruitment of suspected cholera cases, establishing on-site PCR capacity and developing a vaccine register to ensure high-quality vaccination status ascertainment. We will estimate the direct effectiveness of killed oral cholera vaccines through a community-matched case control study, enrolling case and controls up to eight years after the initial vaccination campaigns in Uvira in 2020 and up to three years after the anticipated 2024 campaign. We expect to generate estimates by age group, number of doses, and previous vaccination/disease history. We will conduct two population-based surveys in Uvira to characterise population-level vaccine coverage and water, sanitation and hygiene conditions and will systematically collect data on water availability through the central piped water system. Using these data and the epidemiologic curve, we will build statistical and computational models to estimate the overall impact of the vaccination campaign on incidence and mortality in the community.
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