Sandra Alba

• Research article

Third party monitoring (TPM) is used in development programming to assess deliverables in a contract relationship between purchasers (donors or government) and providers (non-governmental organisations or non-state entities). In this paper, we draw from our experience as public health professionals involved in implementing and monitoring the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS) and the Essential […]

• Article

Epidemiologist Sandra Alba is part of a team that developed a new set of guidelines to address issues of research integrity and fairness in international health research collaborations. She explains what the guidelines hope to achieve, and how.

Quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of an epidemiological study, as its validity is largely determined by data quality. The mounting success of quality management in the industrial sector caused a rapid spread throughout manufacturing industries and beyond. Yet, little has been published so far on quality assurance in epidemiology. In this article […]

• Article

Epidemiologists Sandra Alba and Amera Khan catch up with Bebe Cool, their superstar collaborator on a passion-fuelled project to combat TB.

There is a large gap between the number of people who develop tuberculosis (TB) and those who are diagnosed, treated and notified, with only an estimated 71% of people with TB notified globally in 2019. Implementing better TB case finding strategies is necessary to close this gap. In Cameroon, 1,597 healthcare workers at 725 health […]

• Working Paper

This working paper presents a framework to account for the links between agriculture and health in low- and middle-income countries. It is aimed at supporting public and private sector donors as well as practitioners in the design of strategies, interventions, applied research, and action towards strengthening the resilience of farmers and households by improving agriculture […]

• Research article

Pakistan’s national tuberculosis control programme is among the many programmes worldwide that value the importance of subnational tuberculosis (TB) burden estimates to support disease control efforts, but do not have reliable estimates.TB Hackathon: Development and Comparison of Five Models to Predict Subnational Tuberculosis Prevalence in Pakistan. Against this backdrop, the Pakistan NTP partnered with KIT […]

The World Health Organization recommends postnatal home visits to improve maternal and newborn health, but there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of postnatal home visits effectiveness in humanitarian settings. This paper evaluates postnatal home visits implemented in the constrained humanitarian context of Gaza.

• Research article

In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) published the Action Framework towards TB elimination in low-incidence countries, and in 2016, the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe) published the Roadmap to implement the tuberculosis action plan for the WHO European Region 2016-2020: Towards ending TB and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. They outline blueprints to carry out the […]

• Research article

Posted on May 11, 2020 by BMJ GH Blogs Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts – William Bruce Cameron Do vaccination campaigns increase immunization rates in young children?  Do home-visiting programs for new mothers increase exclusive breastfeeding? Studies designed to answer these questions are known as health impact evaluations […]

The work of health researchers is vitally important to the safety and well-being of people around the world, with the COVID-19 crisis making that all too clear. However, health researchers are facing a crisis of their own, a crisis of trust. It’s fueled partly by the proliferation of social media, the politicization of data, and […]

• Research article

Through a nationally representative household survey in Afghanistan, we conducted an operational study in two relatively secure provinces comparing effectiveness of computer-aided personal interviewing (CAPI) with paper-and-pencil interviewing (PAPI).

This article contextualises experience within the history of previous efforts to measure maternal mortality in Afghanistan, reviews lessons learnt and reflects on their implications. ‘Particularly hard hit by Afghanistan’s 23 years of war, civil strife and Taliban misrule are Afghan women, who are experiencing what health officials call ”catastrophic”death rates associated with pregnancy and childbirth’. […]

• Research article

Progress towards the World Health Organization’s End TB Strategy is monitored by assessing tuberculosis (TB) incidence, often derived from TB notification, assuming complete case detection and reporting. This assumption is unlikely to hold in many settings, including European Union (EU) countries.

• Research article

Assessing the completeness of TB notification to determine whether national data truly reflects the real TB situation in selected EU Member states.

Public trust in health research needs nurturing. How can epidemiologists help? Do vaccines do more harm than good? A huge body of evidence from epidemiology would say “no”, that vaccines in fact do more good than harm. Yet, despite this evidence, many high-income countries are seeing a drop in vaccination coverage and a surge in […]

• Evaluation

The United Nations International Children’s Fund State of Palestine (UNICEF SoP) has contracted the KIT-Juzoor consortium to conduct an external evaluation of the Post Natal Home Visiting (PNHV) programme for postnatal mothers, neonates and their families implemented in Gaza in a humanitarian context. This final report describes the purpose of the evaluation, the methodology used, […]

• Article

When a study of child health in Afghanistan produced an inconsistent result, Sandra Alba realised that men and women can give very different answers to the same questions. She consulted gender experts Franz Wong and Yngve Bråten to understand why.

These are preliminary guidelines. They were first developed internally by KIT epidemiologists and were then presented to global health experts from all over the world for validation through a Delphi consultation process. We are currently preparing a manuscript summarising the methodology followed and the resulting guidelines. You are free to use these guidelines and we […]

Short Periodical Announcements of Research at KIT This is a short periodical Announcement of Research being done by the Centre of Applied Spatial Epidemiology (Case) team

Epidemiology is the cornerstone of global health. It shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying disease risk factors and preventive healthcare targets. See a report of the Global Myths & Global Risks Public Symposium held at KIT on 18 June 2019! Most epidemiological findings are genuine and make an important contribution to global health, […]

Manual This manual is an initiative of the Stop TB partnership, funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and written by the Centre for Applied Spatial Epidemiology (CASE) of KIT Royal Tropical Institute.

• Research article

Nationally representative tuberculosis (TB) prevalence surveys provide invaluable empirical measurements of TB burden but are a massive and complex undertaking. Therefore, methods that capitalize on data from these surveys are both attractive and imperative. The aim of this study was to use existing TB prevalence estimates to develop and validate an ecological predictive statistical model […]

The WHO has approved a post-2015 Global End Tuberculosis Strategy for tuberculosis (TB) 50 prevention, care and control. Countries need to respond by adapting and enhancing their TB control activities. Justifying investment in effective TB control strategies in a country can be achieved in part by defining and monitoring the (MDR) TB epidemic to identify […]

• Research article

Assessing quality of health services, for example through supportive supervision, is essential for strengthening healthcare delivery. Most systematic health facility assessment mechanisms, however, are not suitable for routine supervision. The objective of this study is to describe a quality assessment methodology using an electronic format that can be embedded in supervision activities and conducted by […]

Knowledge of risk factors and their relative importance in different settings is essential to develop effective health education material for the prevention of typhoid. In this study, we examine the effect of household level and individual behavioural risk factors on the risk of typhoid in three Indonesian islands (Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Papua) in the Eastern […]

• Research article

To measure the effect of changing the point-of-care (POC) testing algorithm of urogenital chlamydia for all male high-risk patients to those with only symptoms with respect to: diagnostic accuracy, loss to follow-up, correctly managed consultations and costs.

• Research article

Leishmania (Viannia) guyanensis is believed to be the principal cause of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) in Suriname. This disease is treated with pentamidine isethionate (PI), but treatment failure has increasingly been reported.

• Research article

Abstract Objectives: To compare point-of-care (POC) systems in two different periods: (1) before 2010 when all high-risk patients were offered POC management for urogenital gonorrhoea by Gram stain examination; and (2) after 2010 when only those with symptoms were offered Gram stain examination.