Kohn Colloquium || Kelly K. Baker, Assistant Professor, Occupational & Environmental Health, The University of Iowa

Apr 08, 2016
219 JH

Kohn Colloquium at 3:30 pm in 219 JH                                   

Speaker:  Kelly K. Baker, Assistant Professor, Occupational & Environmental Health, The University of Iowa

Co-authors:  Reid Senesac, Jane Mumma, Oliver Cumming, Kayla Dreeszen

Topic:  Fecal Fingerprints of Gastrointestinal Pathogen Contamination in low-income Kisumu, Kenya

Refreshments will be provided by the Geography department at 3:00 pm in the third floor GSS atrium.

 

ABSTRACT

Young children living in developing countries with unhygienic water and sanitation conditions experience about four episodes of diarrheal disease per year in the first years of life. Chronic disease has severe consequences for the long-term physical and cognitive development of children. In spite of extensive research on the etiology of gastrointestinal disease, little is understood about how best to prevent infection of children in developing countries. Dozens of waterborne pathogens can cause gastrointestinal disease, each of which has their own spatial-temporal distribution pattern in human populations and the environment. Standard practice for detecting exposure risks relies on using simple fecal indicators as a proxy for pathogen exposures. However, correlation between indicators and pathogens can be unpredictable, and indicators may not be appropriate in environments heavily impacted by unsafe human or animal feces management practices. This study aimed to characterize the diversity in gastrointestinal pathogens found across and within child play areas in three low-income, neighborhoods of urban Kisumu, Kenya. A nineteen-pathogen microfluidic qPCR TaqMan array card detected twelve gastrointestinal pathogens in soil and fifteen pathogens in surface water in just one neighborhood. All surface water samples (n=18) were contaminated, with a median of four pathogens (range 1-9) per sample. Eighty-seven percent of soil samples (n=59) were contaminated, with a median of 1.5 pathogens per sample (range 1-7). Our findings confirm that environmental contamination by gastrointestinal pathogens is complex in Kisumu, and suggests that children playing in these neighborhoods frequently risk simultaneous ingestion of multiple pathogens from soil and water. Ongoing work includes factor analysis to identify correlative relationships between pathogens and environmental, geographical, and social drivers of contamination. Additionally, we are mapping these fecal fingerprints and using Kuldorff’s Bernoulli spatial scan to assess the degree of nonrandom clustering in point data across each neighborhood.

 

Dr. Baker received a PhD in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Maryland Baltimore. She was awarded a T32 Fellowship to receive training in global health epidemiology under the mentorship of Myron M. Levine, PI of the Global Enteric Multi-center Study (GEMS) – the largest study of global pediatric diarrhea to date. Her research interests center on understanding how disparities in access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) resources and education influences disease transmission for persons living in the poorest countries in the world, with a focus on women and children. The work is implemented through two integrated lines of interdisciplinary research. The first program uses social-behavioral and environmental microbiology exposure assessment methods to quantify fecally-transmitted disease risks and identify the social, economic, and environmental drivers of risk. The second program explores how disparities in access to safe, clean WASH resources for girls and women impacts reproductive health over their life course, with a special focus on exposures during pregnancy. The goal of this research is to identify better tools for measuring the impact of poor WASH access on the health of women and children in the world’s poorest countries, and contribute to the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions that target gender- and socioeconomic inequalities in WASH access to improve human health.

 

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