2023 Coalition for Operational Research on Neglected Tropical Diseases (COR-NTD) Annual Meeting
16 Oct 23 - 17 Oct 23 | Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel Chicago, IL, USA; virtual
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The COR-NTD 2023 Annual Meeting will be hosted virtually and in-person, October 16-17. 

The goal of the COR-NTD meeting is to strengthen the community of researchers, program implementers and their partners to address knowledge gaps in a coordinated way, thus informing the agenda of future research and facilitating the global efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) and endemic countries to overcome NTDs.

The meeting includes five sessions from Act | West consortium members.

Monday, October 16

1 PM CT

1.5 - Managing, monitoring, and tracking sub-district implementation for schistosomiasis

Schistosomiasis is a focal disease that tends to transmit evenly across homogeneous environments, both large and small (down to a cluster of villages), regardless of administrative boundaries. While this has been well understood, standarised tools to implement and evaluate progress across different transmission archetypes have been lacking, particularly as programs scaled over the last 15 years. Schistosomiasis control programs launched with mass drug administration (MDA) at the district level as populations were treatment-naïve and countries needed to build capacity for MDA alongside other preventive chemotherapy neglected tropical diseases (PC-NTDs).

A recent push by WHO to better target interventions by conducting re-assessment, or impact assessment surveys and implementation of schistosomiasis programs below the district administrative level, has led several countries with mature programs to transition their interventions to a more focalized subdistrict level.

This push has been accompanied by efforts such as the Schistosomiasis Oversampling Study (SOS) and the ESPEN Schistosomiasis Community Data Analysis Tool, both of which aim to establish a method for determining schistosomiasis risk at a level below district. Given the nature of the global schistosomiasis strategy to treat differently based on high or low risk, however, this change in strategy presents several challenges including resource and community mobilization, procurement, training, supply chain management, and monitoring and evaluation.

Presenters:

  • Anna Phillips
  • Darin Evans
  • Yaobi Zhang

 

Tuesday, October 17

1:30 PM CT

Surveillance for trachoma: What knowledge gaps remain in developing and deploying a surveillance system for trachoma and how can operational research fill them?

This session will bring together trachoma experts (national program managers, implementing partners, and researchers) and experts in infectious disease surveillance to discuss the current surveillance plans and strategies that National Programs are implementing for trachoma and how they align with the essential components needed of a national system to detect, analyze and respond to signals of trachoma recrudescence. 

The speakers will discuss trachoma diagnostics and case studies on post-elimination or -validation surveillance strategies or operations research for trachoma. Additionally, experts on infectious disease surveillance will present on surveillance options, address challenges that might be specific to trachoma given available diagnostics and reporting platforms and define thresholds for action.  The end goal of this session is to identify operations research questions that will help to achieve a system that is both workable and sustainable in collecting data while also producing information that enables national programs to monitor and respond appropriately.

Presenters:

  • Stephanie Palmer