Gates Foundation's biggest research funding for South Asian newborns

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing the biggest ever funding for a single research on causes and origins of newborns' death in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, sources in city said on Saturday.

The $11 million funding was committed to conduct the research in one urban and three rural sites in three South Asian countries in 42 months to know the etiology of community acquired infections in neonates, a term refers to babies aged between zero and 28 days.

Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are together the home to one- third of neonatal deaths in the world which loses 3.7 million babies each year before they complete one month of their age. An estimated 130,000 neonates die alone in Bangladesh and half of them from infections within one month of their age.

A three-member delegation of BMGF arrived in the city on Friday to see for themselves the progress of the study that includes a state of the art microbiological laboratory in Dhaka Shishu Hospital. The delegation on Sunday will travel to Sylhet, Bangladesh site of the study.

"The study is the biggest ever of its nature in the world," Prof. Abdullah Baqui of Johns Hopkins University, US, told BSS in an interview. Baqui, one of two co-principal investigators of the study, said such type of studies was done earlier in Kenya and Bangladesh over a very small number of children.

But this time, he said, the study would be conducted over 66,000 live births who would be enrolled and followed up for two months each to collect blood, swab and nasopharyngeal samples to know the nature of viral and bacterial infections.

Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) says at least half of the newborns or nearly 65,000 children aged less than four weeks die due to infections. As a result, the country could not achieve much to save newborns, despite a robust decline of deaths of children aged between one and five years.

According to available statistics, Bangladesh has successfully reduced mortality of children under one year and five years of age, but marked a very little success to cut deaths of neonates, who account 57 percent of total under five child deaths.

Bangladesh, where an estimated 3,500,000 babies are born each year from a 150 million total population, is currently reducing neonatal deaths by only 3 percent per year against a 6 percent reduction of infant mortality and 9 percent death cuts of children aged between 1 and 5 years.

"The ultimate objective of the study is to substantially check the mortality of newborn babies," Prof. Samir K Saha, principal investigator and executive director of Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF) said. Samir and his foundation would lead the research in the countries, with the secretariat at Dhaka Shishu Hospital.

Samir said infection is the leading cause of deaths for newborns and bacterial etiology of hardly 5-10 percent of such neonatal infections are known through blood culture. The present study would try to know the distribution of pathogens that cause disease to babies in community settings.