The UW Department of Global Health and MetaCenter for Pandemic Disease Preparedness and Global Health Security are partnering with Kenyatta National Hospital to host a webinar series, "Washington and Kenya: Opportunities for joint learning on the COVID-19 epidemic". The series, developed by Keshet Ronen and John Kinuthia in response to requests from our long-time partners in Kenya, seeks to share lessons learned from Washington’s early experience of the pandemic, and engage with clinicians, public health practitioners and policymakers in Kenya as they develop Kenya’s response.

By Roshan Khatri (MPH, 2019)

Roshan Khatri graduated from the University of Washington in 2019 with a Master of Public Health in Global Health. He is now working for Headwaters Relief Organization, a nonprofit organization bringing hope and building resilience in people and communities.

The UW MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security has released a new daily newsletter that provides a succinct summary of the latest scientific literature related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each day, there is a firehose of new scientific information emerging about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. This initiative is an attempt to focus that hose to highlight new findings that are most relevant to the public health response.

The Simplifying HIV TREAtment and Monitoring (STREAM) study, led by Global Health professor Paul Drain and recently published in The Lancet HIV, found that point-of-care HIV viral load monitoring and task shifting significantly improved viral suppression and retention in HIV care, as compared to standard laboratory-based HIV viral load testing. This study was the first randomized controlled trial to compare rapid point-of-care HIV viral load testing against standard of care lab-based HIV viral load testing, which usually takes several weeks to return results to patients.

Health Alliance International (HAI), a center of the University of Washington Department of Global Health, has launched their spin on a COVID information hub. The hub is providing updates on the pandemic in Mozambique, Timor-Leste, and Côte d’Ivoire, while also highlighting the adaptation and resilience of health workers and resource-limited health systems. 

Updated: May 28, 2020 at 9:41 a.m.

Gov. Jay Inslee must produce a comprehensive plan for increasing COVID-19 testing in Washington.

This is critical now that Inslee is reopening parts of the economy and deploying a contract-tracing brigade, to better inform people exposed to the novel coronavirus.

By Bill Foege

In the midst of a global pandemic with COVID-19, we seek lessons from the past and we try to define what leadership instructions might be useful today.

President Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of a malaria drug that he now says he takes daily — and the resulting uproar in the news media — appears to be interfering with legitimate scientific research into whether the medicine might work to prevent coronavirus infection or treat the disease in its early stages.

The novel coronavirus can severely affect pregnant women who are overweight or obese before becoming pregnant, new research suggests.

Published today by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the findings show that women who contract the virus may have a higher incidence of preterm birth.