Setting Research Priorities to Reduce Mortality and Morbidity of Childhood Diarrhoeal Disease in the Next 15 Years

Abstract

Zulfi Bhutta and colleagues lay out research priorities for global child diarrheal disease over the next 15 years, which they developed using the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) method. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Rapid, Portable, Multiplexed Detection of Bacterial Pathogens Directly from Clinical Sample Matrices

“…Globally, enteric and diarrheal diseases are one of the most common causes of death in children under the age of five, second only to pneumonia [1,2,3,4]. Though treatable and preventable, diarrhea is a significant problem in the developing world due to the scarcity of safe drinking water and sanitation.…”

Setting an implementation research agenda for Canadian investments in global maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health: a research prioritization exercise

“…Figure 1 shows how the steering committee identified relevant research questions from existing Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative studies. [11][12][13][14][15][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] The final list from the literature contained 45 research questions. Thirtyeight experts were then formally invited by email to participate.…”

“…10 It has now been applied to a wide range of relevant MNCAH topics, including, but not limited to, birth asphyxia, childhood pneumonia and diarrhea, and adolescent sexual and reproductive health. [11][12][13][14] The method involves 5 stages: (i) defining the context and criteria for priority-setting with input from investors and policy-makers; (ii) listing and scoring research investment options by technical experts using the proposed criteria; (iii) weighting the criteria according to wider societal values with input from other stakeholders; (iv) calculating research priority scores and average expert agreement scores; and (v) ranking research priorities according to research priority scores. An initial stage was added to the present study, in which the steering committee extracted implementationfocused research priorities from the existing Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative literature before inviting input from technical experts.…”

Setting priorities for development of emerging interventions against childhood diarrhoea

“…The 10 emerging interventions were chosen for evaluation from the results of a previous CHNRI exercise [12] and further consultation with a paediatric gastroenterologist ( Table 1 ). The previous exercise [12] brought together 10 teams, corresponding to research avenues in childhood diarrhoeal disease.…”

“…Recently, a new initiative has been launched – Global Action Plan for Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD) – which prioritizes a research agenda for childhood diarrhoea beyond 2015 [2–4,11]. The results of their very comprehensive CHNRI process, with the timeline extended 15 years ahead and an expanded scope of research on preventing morbidity, have been published recently[12]. The purpose of this exercise was to further contribute to the active field of setting research priorities for childhood diarrhoea, by reviewing the landscape of new ideas and/or novel potential interventions – hereby referred to as “emerging interventions” – and set priorities for investments in their development.…”