Sabin2 Project lead investigators, l-r: Mami Taniuchi; Dr. K. Zaman; Bill Petri; Dr. Mohammad Yunus; Dr. Rashidul Haque (Drs. Zaman, Yunus and Haque are affiliated with the icddr in Matlab, Bangladesh.)
Mami Taniuchi, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, has done groundbreaking work with ID’s Eric Houpt, Bill Petri and others on a method for tracking immunity and virus shedding after oral polio vaccination (the common method for polio vaccination in low-income countries). The results of this work were published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology in November 2014 — and got the immediate attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2015, with a $1.5 million Gates grant (and an additional $1 million from Gates in supplemental funding), the team conducted a follow-up study, “Assessment of Community Transmission of Sabin Type 2 Virus in Bangladesh.”
First infant enrolled in the polio vaccine study, with his mother.
Dr. Taniuchi led the field research portion of the study, in which a team collected data from rural villages in Bangladesh comparing poliovirus transmission rates for two populations: those vaccinated with trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV), administered in a three-dose series, and those vaccinated with a three-dose series of another oral polio vaccine, bOPV, plus one to two doses of inactive polio vaccine (IPV). The study was conducted in 67 villages around Matlab, Bangladesh.
Along with co-principal investigator Bill Petri, other investigators on the grant were Dr. K. Zaman, Dr. Rashidul Haque, and Dr. Yunus (consultant) from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh (icddr-b).
When asked about the special challenges — and rewards — of conducting field research in Bangladesh, Dr. Taniuchi responded:
Lab technicians in the Matlab laboratory.
“The biggest challenge was setting up the environmental surveillance portion of the project in rural Matlab. First, I had to learn how to test water samples from the environment, and then process them in a resource-limited lab. Next, with help from Dr. Famulare, our modeling expert from Infectious Disease Modeling in Seattle, we set out to identify and mark three potential sampling spots in each of the 67 villages in the study, using a handheld GPS device. The villages are difficult to reach by car; most are only accessible by bicycle or auto ricksaw. Within the villages, our team travelled by foot to reach the sampling spots.
The entire Matlab field and lab team.
Doing this work gave us a great opportunity to see what daily life is like in these villages, and to meet many of the participants in our study. Although the work is complex and labor-intensive, Bill and I are truly indebted to our amazing field team in Matlab and Dhaka — a group of about 100 made up of doctors, nurses, health community workers, and researchers. They made our study come to life.”
Filed Under: Research
Tags: ID, Infectious Diseases & International Health, Research