There are about 279 clinical studies being (or have been) conducted in Ethiopia. The country of the clinical trial is determined by the location of where the clinical research is being studied. Most studies are often held in multiple locations & countries.
Soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) are a group of parasitic worms that infect millions of children in sub-tropical and tropical countries, resulting in malnutrition, growth stunting, intellectual retardation and cognitive deficits. To control the morbidity due to these worms, school-based deworming programs are implemented, in which anthelminthic drugs are administered to children without prior diagnosis. The continued fight against these worms is aided by the London declaration on neglected tropical diseases, which helps sustain and expand global drug donation program, resulting in an unprecedented growth of deworming programs. However, the high degree of drug pressure makes deworming programs vulnerable to the development of anthelmintic resistance because they only rely on one drug with sometimes suboptimal efficacy and there is no availability of alternative drugs. Moreover, at present, there is no surveillance system to monitor the emergence and spread of anthelmintic resistance. It remains unclear to what extent the efficacy of drugs may have dropped and whether anthelmintic resistance is already present. This project aims to strengthen the monitoring and surveillance of drug efficacy and anthelmintic resistance in STH programs. As such, it will support deworming programs in their quest to eliminate STHs as a public health problem. The specific objectives of the first work package are to validate diagnostic tools to monitor drug efficacy and the spread of anthelmintic resistance, and to validate molecular markers for benzimidazole resistance. This study will be conducted at four different sites (Ethiopia, Tanzania, Lao PDR and Brazil) and will focus on school-aged children (age 5-14). At baseline subjects will be asked to provide a recent stool sample which will be processed using 3 different microscopic techniques (KK, Mini-Flotac and FECPAKG2). All children will be treated with a single-oral dose of albendazole (ALB) 400 mg and 14-21 days after treatment, a second stool sample will be collected from all children to again determine the fecal egg counts. At each sampling, stool is stored in preservative. Stored stool will be shipped to Belgium for DNA extraction and quantitative PCR (qPCR) analysis. A subset of the samples will be analysed by pyrosequencing to evaluate the single nucleotide polymorphisms in the b-tubulin gene. Pooling of the stored samples will also be performed to compare with the values obtained from analysing individual samples.
The cluster randomized controlled trial was done in Pastoralist community of Afar region, Ethiopia for a total of nine months. There was three arms in the study. The type of randomization will be a cluster randomized controlled trial where kebele are randomized to two different interventions and control groups. These interventions are women education to use family planning and male education/involvement to enhance family planning use in the community.
This cluster randomized controlled trial will test the effect of the promotion of vitamin A-rich orange flesh sweet potato (OFSP) production and nutrition education on vitamin A and energy intake, including any added value of the Healthy Baby Toolkit.
The main objective is to implement Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) at selected facilities in Addis Ababa and Oromia Regions to achieve high effective coverage in the catchment population.
Among several factors contributing to the occurrence of undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overnutrition, and chronic disease, unhealthy diet is one of the most important factors that need to be addressed to tackle the burden in low- and middle-income countries. To maintain healthy eating in a population, it is crucial to develop and implement country-specific food-based dietary guidelines as well as monitor the adherence of the population with the guidelines. The aim of this study is to generate evidence that will help the development and validation of food-based dietary guidelines and a healthy eating index for Ethiopia. The method to develop Ethiopian food-based dietary guidelines is adapted from the 2015 Dutch food-based dietary guidelines and the Dutch healthy diet index development and validation process, and the 1998 FAO/WHO preparation and use of food-based dietary guidelines. A multidisciplinary technical working will be established to develop FBDGs. The working group will identify key messages for the guidelines that can address priority diet-related public health problems in Ethiopia based on the evidence that will be generated by the PhD student from Wageningen University and Research. The evidence generation will begin by identifying top ten diet-related diseases that lead to high morbidity and mortality in 2016. The nutrition situation (nutritional status, dietary pattern, and nutrient gaps) analysis will be conducted to define the objectives of FBDGs. A systematic review will be conducted by formulating research questions to address the objectives of the FBDGs. The FBDGs will be translated for a specific population subgroup using linear mathematical programming and validated for cultural appropriateness, acceptability, consumer understanding and practicality of the messages. Focus group discussions and key informant interviews will be conducted to validate the FBDGs. The most recent Ethiopian national food consumption survey data collected in 2011 will be used to develop a healthy eating index (HEI). The selection of a healthy eating component of HEI will be done based on the FBDGs. Validation of a healthy eating index will be conducted by comparing the HEI score based on 24-hour recall with the HEI score based on food frequency questionnaire for population characteristics and association with micronutrient intake with or without adjusting for energy and anthropometric measurement. Developing short food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) that can be scored with the index for dietary counseling and public health practice as well as dietary gap assessment for policy recommendation will be part of the study. Validation of FFQ will be conducted by collecting primary data among women of reproductive age in 500 households in rural and urban areas of Ethiopia. The data will be analyzed using the latest version of STATA, SPSS, and NVIVO software. Correlations and other appropriate advanced statistical technique will be applied as needed to answer the objectives of the study. Ethical approval will be received from the medical ethical committee of Wageningen University and Research and scientific and ethical review office of Ethiopian Public Health Institute. This Ph.D. research is supported by the Food Systems for Healthier Diets flagship of the CGIAR- Agriculture for Nutrition and Health Programme coordinated by International Food Policy Research Institute. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Ethiopian Public Health Institute are collaborators of this project to develop the FBDGs.
To assess the impact of soil iron intake from teff flour on iron status in infants in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia.
Mothers and young children in rural Ethiopia lack sufficient nutrition, and a compounding factor is presence of high levels of fluoride (> 5-10 mg/day) affecting body functions. Interventions involving chickens to provide eggs and eggshell (a source of calcium) are one solution. The overall purpose is to examine how increasing dietary calcium by using eggshell powder (ESP) reduces fluoride (F) absorption in women. It is known calcium binds F to prevent its absorption but application of this to a community based study has not been tested. The aim is to provide chickens to produce eggs for young children and to provide ESP to women (mothers). For children, an egg a day should improve growth and nutritional status. For women, the ESP provides calcium to reduce fluorosis and therefore improve function without affecting iron and zinc status. For the women, blood samples will be tested in a subsample for F, calcium, zinc and iron; urine samples will be measured for F, calcium and creatinine (to correct spot urine). Hemoglobin will be measured as an indicator of overall nutritional status in women and children. Nutritional status of young children (6-18 mo) and of their mothers prior and after the intervention (by 6 months) will be assessed. between 6 and 12 month there will be monitoring for sustainability of chilckens in the community; for continued use of egg (in children) and ESP (in women); during this time the control group will receive chickens and also undergo monitoring. The study will take place in the Rift valley of Southern Ethiopia. Identification of the knowledge, attitude and practices (KAP) of mothers on egg consumption will be done at baseline and at the end ("endline"). Caregivers will be instructed to give each child 1 egg (cooked) per day in the intervention, and one "bottle cap" of eggshell powder (1000 mg calcium) per day for themselves. Families receiving chickens will be instructed on cage construction. Throughout the study, any problems arising in keeping chickens will be recorded in order to assess the feasibility and practicality of raising chickens as way to mitigate fluorosis and improve nutritional status.
To conduct a sub-regional micronutrient survey (SRMNS) assessing the prevalence of vitamin A, Zn, and Fe status in the country
Title: Evaluation of host biomarker-based point-of-care tests for targeted screening for active TB (Screen TB) Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) places severe pressure on health care services of the developing world. Despite the introduction of the highly sensitive and specific GeneXpert MTB/RIF (GeneXpert) test [1] with a potential turn-around time of two hours, many people in high TB prevalence areas still do not have access to efficient TB diagnostic services due to logistical constraints in these settings. A cost effective, rapid, point-of-care screening test with high sensitivity would identify people with a high likelihood for active TB and would prioritize them for testing with more expensive, technically or logistically demanding assays including GeneXpert or liquid culture, facilitating cost-effective diagnostic work-up in resource-limited settings. A serum cytokine signature for active TB disease, discovered in the AE-TBC project, with a sensitivity of 89% (CI 78 - 95%) and specificity of 76% (CI 68 - 83%), will be optimised and utilized in a point-of-care format (TransDot) to rapidly test for TB disease in symptomatic people. Hypothesis: The TransDot test will achieve a sensitivity of > 90% for TB disease, in a training set of people suspected of having TB disease, and be validated (achieve similarly high sensitivity) subsequently in a prospective test set of people suspected of having TB disease, when compared to a composite gold standard of sputum culture, smear, GeneXpert, chest X-ray, TB symptoms and TB treatment response. Objectives: The overall objective of the study is to incorporate a six-marker serum signature into a multiplex UCP-LFA format, referred to as TransDot, for finger-prick blood testing. The end point of the study is the accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of the UCP-LFA TransDot test on finger-prick blood for active TB and will be prospectively compared against gold standard composite diagnostic criteria (GeneXpert, MGIT culture, TB sputum smear, CXR, TB symptom screen and response to TB treatment). Primary: The primary outcome of interest will be accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the TransDot finger-prick test when compared with the composite gold standard tests.
The investigators propose a cluster-randomized clinical trial to determine whether an intensive, targeted azithromycin distribution strategy is effective for elimination of trachoma at the kebele level compared to the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of annual azithromycin distribution.