Communicable Diseases: Vulnerability, Risk and Poverty

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HD205: Team for Applied Research to Generate Effective Tools and Strategies - TARGETS Consortium

Director: Sandy Cairncross, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/dfid/targets/

Team for Applied Research to Generate Effective Tools and Strategies - TARGETS programme record

The main aim of TARGETS will be to improve the health of the poor and vulnerable through effective communicable disease control. The research will build on more than a decade of productive DFID-funded research by consortium members into the control of tuberculosis and malaria. Initial work will focus on those two diseases, but will be gradually extended to other communicable diseases including meningitis, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections.

TARGETS will conduct research to develop new tools to diagnose, prevent and treat communicable diseases, but will also develop and test new strategies to implement those tools sustainably at national scale, and to improve effective access to them by the poor and vulnerable.

The Consortium, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, comprises 7 other partners:

• The Centre for Health Research and Development, Pune, India
• Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre, Tanzania
• INDEPTH Network of Demographic Surveillance Systems, Accra, Ghana
• KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, The Hague, Netherlands
• Makerere Medical College, and its Infectious Diseases Institute, Uganda
• Swiss Tropical Institute, Basle
• ZAMBART, the Zambian AIDS-related Tuberculosis project, Lusaka, Zambia.

Most of TARGETS' research work will be focused in the five developing countries where partners are based; Ghana, India, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. One partner, INDEPTH, is a network of 33 potential study sites throughout Africa, Asia, Central America and Oceania. Additional research and dissemination activities will be carried out elsewhere when appropriate; for example, some of our research will be in situations of complex emergency, natural disaster, or post-conflict.