The COVID-19 pandemic has put health systems under considerable stress. Health care workers (HCW) are a critical part of the health system´s pandemic response and have been challenged both by high workload and high risk of exposure. The BCHW project addresses these challenges: in a multisite international study between…
At the end of April 2022, a World Health Organization (WHO) mission with the participation of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) took place to Kyrgyzstan to assess the national hepatitis and HIV elimination programmes. This included consideration of the objectives for two Global…
FDMN (Rohingya refugees) and infectious disease outbreaks In 2017, about 700,000 Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN) arrived in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, from the neighboring State of Myanmar. This influx added to previous refugees, as FDMN have fled from ethnic and religious persecution since the 1970s. Today, about one million FDMN…
Within the framework of the Global Health Protection Programme (GHPP), the IDEA project focuses on the molecular diagnostics of highly pathogenic viruses in Sri Lanka. In the course of the past years, PCR laboratories were set up in the partner institutions Colombo North Teaching Hospital (CNTH) and University of Colombo…
In Rwanda, the incidence unexpectedly rose sharply again in June 2021 and reached a plateau of 700-950 new cases / day with a presumably high number of unreported cases. The main challenges in the country are the long distances that patients have to cover in rural regions in order to…
It was the first large face-to-face training of the department Centre for International Health Protection (ZIG) in an international setting since the start of the pandemic and carried out in compliance with a strict hygiene concept. The training course was implemented by the team of the EMT National Focal Point…
The latest Ebola outbreak in the DRC was announced on 11 May 2017. With only eight cases, the chain of infection could be quickly interrupted and was confined to the remote ‘Likati Health Zone’ in the province of Bas-Uélé in the northeast of the DRC. The outbreak was declared over…
During a six weeks-stay (30 January – 15 March 2021), Paul Pitzinger from RKI (P3) visited the partner sites in both Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. One aim of the visit was to support our partners in SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics in particular technical support in serological SARS-CoV-2 analyses. Another aim…
During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic National Immunization Technical Advisory Groups (NITAGs) face various challenges: NITAGs normally develop recommendations based on a broad body of evidence. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence needed to develop recommendations e.g. on risk factors for severe and fatal courses or effects of COVID-19 variants on…