International Health Research

In 1993, Catherine Pope and Nicholas Mays argued for greater use of qualitative techniques in health research. They published several good papers that helped researchers understand what qualitative research is. They suggested that researchers would benefit in using qualitative methods. Since then qualitative research methods is widely accepted in health services research.

Now they are worried the methods are not always used properly.

Please read their article in this week BMJ where they critically evaluate how far qualitative research has come. They ask some thorough questions whether researchers use qualitative research to its full potential.

Pope C, Mays N, Critical reflections on the rise of qualitative research. BMJ 2009;339:b3425

Recently, Torleif Markussen Lunde, PhD student at Centre for International Health and Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway, opened a blog discussing malaria prediction.

He writes:
Open Malaria Warning (OMaWa) is a child of EMaPS (Ethiopian Malaria Prediction System), and the model will also be used in a recent project funded by ESA (European Space Agency).

All models and source code will be released under GPL >=2 license once they have been published. Information on where to get the source code will be posted once the distribution system is ready (svn and track).

His blog is at open.w.uib.no

The Norwegian public health authorities have adjusted their prognosis for the H1N1 epidemic in the country. More important, they now describe a worst case scenario, and avoid the pitfall of forecasting a possible epidemic.

Their earlier projections were wrong, and resembled more guesswork than science.

The government is now preparing the population for a possible worst case. This is a sound policy, and would also help the population and health care system to prepare for new epidemics in the future.

However, I still think we need to evaluate how Norway translates early warnings into policy. So far it has been a costly exercise, even for one of the richest countries in the world.

Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by leishmania parasites. It is transmitted by the bite of sand fly. Most often the disease is transmissible from animals (zoonosis). South-west Ethiopia, has both the cutanous form and the visceral form of the disease.

The picture shows a boy with cutaneous leishmaniasis from Ochollo. Ochollo is about 35 km north of Arba Minch, and is a place were people live in close contact the hyrax, the animal that is the reservoir of the disease.

Visceral leishmaniasis is a severe form in which the parasites have migrated to the organs such as the spleen, liver and bone marrow. It is endemic in the lowlands.

Arba Minch Hospital has a research centre for leishmaniasis where they do clinical trials for new drugs for visceral leishmaniasis.