Ongoing actions

What happens when Covid-19 meets Africa? To find answers, this article examines tertiary management education delivered by the continent’s business schools in the context of Africa’s susceptibilities to the pandemic. The concept of proximity is applied as an axiomatic analytic complement to Covid’s transmission pathways impacting on the psychosocial foundation of human relations, people’s spatial distribution and their time perspectives. Taking management literature into account, proximity is applied to Africa’s business schools in terms of their immediate and long-term responses to the pandemic, suggesting practical post-Covid reforms considered from a humanistic management approach to management education and scholarship. A theme throughout this article is that Covid-19’s exposure of contextual vulnerabilities presents an opportunity and imperative for business schools’ re-missioning and renewal to enhance relevance, quality and building post-Covid resilience. The article provides a framework for the study of other Covid-sensitive sectors or organizations and theory development and testing using different proximity conceptualizations, frames and combinations thereof. Limitations of the study are discussed.

The aim of this project is to explore how upper secondary school leaders, counsellors, teachers, students, and parents perceived and experienced the impact of COVID-19. The study focuses particularly on the conversion from classroom to distance education and its long-term effects. Extensive and diverse data are being collected i.e. interviews, surveys and classroom observations and distinct methods used. Its national and international value concerns research on various aspects of education and social justice and the interplay of the principal stakeholders. 

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic intersects with rising adolescent mental health problems and harmful behaviors, such as depressed mood, anxiety, and self-harm, and suicidal behavior. Addressing this pressing public health concern, the overarching objective of this project is to determine what psychological, environmental and genetic factors contribute to adolescent mental health and behaviors during COVID-19. Specific aims: 1) Examine the short- and long-term effect of COVID-19 on adolescent’ mental health and behavior; 2) Identify risk and protective factors associated with short- and long-term adolescent’ mental health problems and harmful behaviors during COVID-19; 3) Determine the genetic contribution towards mental health problems and harmful behaviors in adolescents following COVID-19. Participants comprise 2,378 adolescents (61% of youth born in Iceland in 2004) in the one-of-a-kind longitudinal population-based LIFECOURSE cohort in which extensive social survey data, including four-waves of survey data collected during the pandemic, is coupled with genotypes and official data from the unique Icelandic health and developmental registries. Conducted by an international team of scientists, this multidisciplinary project will through its scope and exceptional data sources fundamentally advance our knowledge of what adolescents are most at risk of being negatively affected by this pandemic and inform prevention/intervention efforts needed to mitigate its impact.

This research builds on ongoing research to investigate cross-cultural differences in risks facing adolescents in a context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mail, web and social media-based surveys are both quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed to gain a better understanding of how the pandemic affects children and young people’s lives, health and well-being and family needs by employing a cross-cultural comparative perspective.

Principal Investigators:

• MORISAKI Naho (Japan), Chief Researcher, National Center for Child Health and Development
• Polly Waite (United Kingdom), Senior Clinical Research, Psychologist, University of Oxford

Project in collaboration with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) (United Kingdom)

This comparative study investigates healthcare financing policies and practices in healthcare service delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing and comparing the institutional arrangements used to fund COVID-19-related health services and sources of funding for the services in different health system contexts, this study will help inform health system policy in anticipation of future similar challenges and will contribute to the debate in countries currently undertaking healthcare financing reform for universal health coverage (UHC).

Principal Investigators:

• HONDA Ayako (Japan), Professor, Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University
• Valéry Ridde (France), Research Director, Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), IRD, Université de Paris

Project in collaboration with Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) (France)

STEP_UP is a European Erasmus+ project that started in December 2020 and will last until the end of February 2023. It intends to develop a training tool for social care and community stakeholders, where they are introduced to the impact of behaviours in the spread of a pandemic/emergency situation and trained, through gaming strategies, to prevent and cope.

The core of this project will be an educational game but that can also be used as a recreational game for the common public. In STEP_UP, the players will play with the aim to stop a pandemic from spreading. A list of measures will be displayed and the player needs to learn about them in order to be able to choose those that would help to impede the virus spread without damaging the economy or causing societal anger. This would also help people to better understand and follow governmental measures (which they actually not always do in current times) and to set aside true facts from myths and fake news.

Besides the gaming tool and the complete training toolkit, a manual on social and policy interventions will be delivered, that aims to offer target-group oriented guidelines and insights on early detection, preventive measures, healthcare and social care interventions, policy measures and communication. The manual will be completed with real-life oriented user stories, good practices and lessons learned.

WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO)

20 August 2021

Call for experts

Issued on:  20 August 2021

Deadline: 10 September 2021

The World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking experts to serve as members of the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). This “Call for experts” provides information about the advisory group in question, the expert profiles being sought, the process to express interest, and the process of selection.

Background

The rapid emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 has highlighted the importance of being prepared for any future event, to be able to identify novel pathogens early and to address the risk factors that contribute to their emergence and spread. In May 2020, the World Health Assembly, through resolution WHA73.1, requested the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) to continue to work closely with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and countries, as part of the One Health approach, to identify the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the route of introduction to the human population.

There have been an increasing number of high threat pathogens emerging and reemerging in recent years with, for example, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Nipah, avian influenza, the latest being SARS-CoV-2. There is not only need for robust surveillance and early actions for rapid detection and mitigation efforts, but a need for a robust and systematic processes to establish the study around the emergence of these pathogens and routes of transmission from their natural reservoirs to humans.

To this end, the Director-General has established the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins on Novel Pathogens (hereinafter referred to as ‘SAGO”). The SAGO will advise the WHO Secretariat on technical and scientific considerations regarding emerging and re-emerging pathogens, and will be composed of experts acting in a personal capacity. It is established in accordance with the WHO Regulations for Study and Scientific Groups, Collaborating Institutions and Other Mechanisms of Collaboration.

JITSUVAX is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project coordinated by the University of Bristol working with five other EU institutions as well as one in Canada. The project will run from May 2021 until April 2025.

Vaccine hesitancy, the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services, has been cited as a serious threat to global health by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO has also identified Health Care Professionals (HCPs) as the most trusted influencers of vaccination decisions. JITSUVAX leverages those insights to turn toxic misinformation into a potential asset based on two premises. Firstly that the best way to acquire knowledge and to combat misperceptions is by employing misinformation itself, either in weakened doses as a cognitive “vaccine”, or through thorough analysis of misinformation during “refutational learning”, and secondly that HCPs form the critical link between vaccination policies and vaccine uptake. The principal objective of JITSUVAX is therefore to leverage misinformation about vaccinations into an opportunity by training HCPs through inoculation and refutational learning, thereby neutralizing misinformation among HCPs and enabling them to communicate more effectively with patients.

The study is led by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist based at the University of Bristol. The study team consists of psychologists, behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, health communication specialists and clinicians. All have expertise in vaccine hesitancy.

The individual groups are based at the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge in the UK, the Turun yliopisto in Finland, the L'Observatoire Régional de la Santé in France, the Universität Erfurt in Germany, theUniversidade de Coimbra in Portugal and the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada.

British Families in Lockdown/BFiL’ is a qualitative study which has spoken to diverse families across each of the three UK lockdowns with regards to family dynamics, family relationships, children’s education, parental employment, health and well-being, social connectedness, technology use, and adherence to government restrictions.  Sixty parents participated in semi-structured online/telephone interviews in the first lockdown and our participants have continued to share their experiences with us via an online survey and follow-up interviews. 

We have several briefing papers that have been published by UK Parliament, have contributed towards various reports by international and national organisations and received media interest in our study (such as BBC News, The Guardian, The Observer). Full details on our focus of inquiries, key findings, and publications to date can be found here: British Families in Lockdown study - Research - Leeds Trinity University