Infectious Disease Implementation Research

Collaborating widely, the team is developing and implementing better ways to observe and evaluate the effectiveness of public health programs, to optimise therapy for both acute and complex diseases, and to explore new strategies through disease modelling - providing real-world results that are immediately applicable.

They use a range of methods to conduct their research, including pragmatic randomised controlled trials, observational comparative effectiveness studies and data linkage studies, and causal network and transmission modelling.

The introduction of rotavirus, whooping cough and pneumococcal vaccines had consequences that were not predicted in clinical trials, demonstrating the importance of ongoing monitoring and surveillance of vaccination strategies. The team is identifying affordable and feasible strategies that can be applied in virtually any community, regardless of their healthcare resources, in order to improve the health of as many children as possible.

Focusing on common and serious childhood infections such as gastroenteritis and respiratory infections, they are looking at new and innovative methods of evaluating treatments. This includes examining their effectiveness in the clinical settings they are intended to be used and working on projects to gauge efficacy of new and existing preventions and treatments in a way that has never been done before in Australia.

The Infectious Disease Implementation Research Team works with clinicians, policy makers, epidemiologists and statisticians to help ensure their research is efficient, sustainable and responsive to clinical and policy needs. They also work in close collaboration with other research groups around Australia, particularly to support many studies that are underway at sites outside of Western Australia.

Team Highlights

MPH student Dr Marie Estcourt finalised the analysis of the NHMRC funded retrospective case-control study into the association of pertussis vaccination and food allergy and presented the preliminary results at the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) annual scientific meeting in May 2018.

PhD student Mejbah Bhuiyan submitted his thesis ‘Studies of the infectious causes of pneumonia in children’ in September 2018. His thesis by publication included a prospective case-control study which was accepted for publication in Thorax in September 2018.

Enrolment commenced in two RCTs in early 2018: the ORVAC trial of rotavirus vaccination in the Northern Territory, and the OPTIMUM trial of whole cell pertussis vaccination in Perth.

Earlier this year, a Medical Research Fund research grant was awarded to study ‘Bayesian Evidence-Adaptive Trial to optimise management of cystic fibrosis’ (2018-2022, $3.5 million).