Malawi Liverpool Wellcome (MLW) is set to launch two new studies branching out from Pneumonia Conjugate Vaccine (PCV-13) trial in Blantyre District.
The new studies under the umbrella study, Impact of Pneumococcal and Malaria Vaccines for children on Antimicrobial Resistance in Malawi (IVAR) are aimed at exploring the differences between 2-plus-One and 3-plus-Zero strategies for administering PCV-13 vaccine as well as understanding the role of PCV-13 in addressing antimicrobial resistance.
Meanwhile, the IVAR steering team has successfully engaged stakeholders in some of the target sites for the thorough implementation of the researches in question.
IVAR Research Assistant Farouck Bonomali said, “Through the community engagement, the team is also happy to have learnt that communities do understand and appreciate the need to research antimicrobial resistance from communities’ perspective. With the community leaders and health workers’ positive response to IVAR, the team is looking forward to implementation once all the preparations have been taken care of.”
Bonomali further said the findings of these studies are crucial because they would potentially support wider implementation of vaccination, and form a key component of efforts to preserve the efficacy of antibiotics.
IVAR is a multicenter, cross-sectional study with 3 surveys planned to be conducted over 3 years. Survey 1 will start in Blantyre in December 2021, Survey 2 will commence in August 2022 and the Survey 3 is set for November 2023. All surveys are expected to run for 4 months. In Mangochi, surveys will be scheduled to coincide with the malaria season, starting in early 2022.
