Whoa, so cool!
Norah Magero is the co-founder of sustainable solutions company Drop Access. An engineer, she was approached by Kenyan farmers seeking a solution to keep milk from going off in transit, for which she designed a solar-powered portable refrigeration box.
When the pandemic struck, Magero and her team realised her cool box could also be used to transport vaccines to remote areas of Kenya while keeping them chilled. The VacciBox was born - particularly crucial for countries where some areas are off-grid. She already has orders from Mozambique, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and India.
A not-so-hard pill to swallow
One reason some people are vaccine hesitant is trypanophobia, or a fear of needles. However, a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been exploring an alternative vaccine solution for the needle-phobic.
They are working on an easy-to-swallow pill, the size of a blueberry, that could deliver the Covid vaccine, and other mRNA inoculations, directly to the stomach lining. The study, led by Alex Abramson, was published in the journal Matter, which tested the pills on pigs with promising results that they hope to further test in future studies.
Off the beaten track
With plenty of misinformation circulating online, vaccine hesitancy is widespread in in the southern African nation of Malawi. Last March, thousands of vaccine doses expired and had to be destroyed.
So in September, when another batch of doses approached their expiry date, health workers in Malawi’s came up with a proactive solution. They travelled around the city of Blantyre in a ‘vaccination van’ in convoy with a truck blaring music and encouragement through loudspeakers. They dispelled vaccine myths and made shots more accessible to those who had previously struggled to take a day off work to reach a clinic. Within weeks, all their doses had been administered.
Knock knock
India’s health system relies on an army of approximately one million women volunteers. These frontline healthworkers, known as Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) women, have been responsible for disseminating vaccine messages and bringing people to vaccine centres across the country.
Their duties involve conducting door-to-door Covid-19 vaccination awareness drives and holding community meetings to educate people about the vaccine. ASHAs can speak local languages and have direct access to every household, which accounts for the success of this system in increasing vaccination rates.
Pioneering pouches
A new plastic pouch pioneered by the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) in Senegal to store and distribute vaccines is set to help Africa speed up the fight against Covid-19 and other diseases.
The sterile pouches can store up to 200 doses of vaccine, 10 times the capacity of the glass vials they will replace. The pouches, which look similar to an IV drip bag, are cheaper, lighter, and easier to store. Vitally, they also mean that jabs can be used for longer than just a few hours when a vial is opened.
Kebabs ‘n’ jabs
Punjabi Grill is a family-run kebab restaurant situated in Gravesend, Kent in the UK. It is owned by two pharmacists, brothers Rav and Raj Chopra. After their father was hospitalised with Covid in December 2020, they decided to encourage people in their community to get vaccinated.
The brothers attached a marquee to their restaurant and opened it as a walk-in centre in early January of this year, offering “kebabs ‘n’ jabs”, reports the Guardian. Their restaurant is now one of hundreds of such centres that are part of the UK’s wider vaccination programme.
Lab-in-a-backpack
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have developed a Covid-19 testing lab that fits into a backpack, and is as effective at detecting Covid infections as PCR tests. The cost price of each test is just $3.50 (£2.60), which could offer poor and remote areas a cheaper and more accessible way of detecting the virus.
The kit requires a simple saliva sample and uses low-cost hardware, including a centrifuge made from recycled computer hard drives, to get a result.
Queen Mary researchers have not patented the invention, and they are hoping that entrepreneurs or health organisations will use the technique to make Covid-19 testing much more widely available, especially in the developing world.
Where there’s a will there’s a way
On the border of Kenya and Somalia, Al-Shabaab militants have declared a war on vaccines with their own propaganda campaign. But the Alinjughur Women’s Association and other women’s groups are fighting back, working to counter misinformation and distribute the vaccine.
They are using radio broadcasts and information sessions to reach other women to educate them about the benefits of the jab and transporting the vaccine to remote villages by camel.
The science of sequencing
In Africa, there are over 500 scientists working in 30 countries involved in genome sequencing, according to the South Africa-based Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative, which aims to create and support a pan-continental network of laboratories conducting research in genomic sciences.
South African scientist Tulio de Oliveira and his teams became the first to alert the world to the Beta and Omicron variants, allowing governments around the world to act quickly. His work has highlighted the critical importance of genomic surveillance in identifying variants, tracking their transmission and helping authorities to make quick public health decisions.
