Good/Sad news

We are very sad to farewell Rhiannon Wallace this month; particularly as we couldn’t have a traditional tea-room celebration of her time with us.  Rhiannon has been working with Martyn, Katie, Dani and Angus on the CampySource study since mid-2018, and has returned to Canada.  Her input on microbiology and genomics has been invaluable, and she will remain involved in the project.  We wish her all the best!

Outreach and engagement

The IDEM team are very busy assisting with the COVID-19 response.  The MAE staff and students are central to this response.  The 2019 MAE cohort have been working very long hours assisting at national and jurisdictional levels, while the new 2020 MAE cohort have really had to hit the ground running.  Tambri Housen and Ben Polkinghorne have run contact tracing workshops for students from RSPH and ANUMS to allow them to assist ACT Health in maintaining contact tracing despite rising case numbers.  Twelve students took part in the first workshop, and a second workshop is planned to occur soon that will also include students from the University of Canberra. 

Martyn Kirk is assisting in the National Incident Room after returning from the Diamond Princess quarantine site at Howard Springs, while Amy Parry has been assisting the Western Pacific Regional office of the WHO (WPRO).  Katie Glass has been contributing to national modelling efforts to estimate the likely burden on the health system. Sam Colquhoun is working with a Vietnamese MAE student to finalise a COVID-19 surveillance paper, and is also supporting ACT Health to develop systems in REDCap for COVID-19 data. Sam, Dani, Chani and Anna assisted with data entry from the Diamond Princess epidemiology study for Martyn Kirk. Sam, Tambri and others from RSPH (Rachael, Ginny et al.) are developing a COVID-19 KAP study, recently submitted to ANU COVID-19 funding and HREC.

Papers accepted/published

Amy Parry, Martyn D Kirk, Samantha M Colquhoun, Tambri Housen. Rapid Response: Enhancing the effectiveness of the epidemiology workforce responding to Covid-19. BMJ 2020;368:m107. https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1075/rr-0

Progress on research projects

Sam is continuing to manage the Timor-Leste stunting and malnutrition study. There is a slow down on the research currently, and a new local staff member has started.