Cuba
Duration
2022-2026
Lead institutions
Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM)
Instituto de Medicina Tropical "Pedro Kouri" (IPK)
Instituto Nacional de Higiene, Epidemiología y Microbiología (INHEM)
Academic partners
Veerle Vanlerberghe (ITM)
Jorge Fraga Nodarse (IPK)
Adolfo Gerardo Alvarez Pérez (INHEM)
Project status
Ongoing
General objective
In Cuba, environmental issues are interconnected with infectious diseases and widespread chronic conditions. The overall objective is to leverage institutional capacity to address these syndemics, and ultimately achieve better health for all Cubans.
Summary
The institutional collaboration with IPK/INHEM is directed towards capacity strengthening, focusing on the prevention and control of the dual burden of (re)emerging infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases, which have strong social determinants and numerous shared risk factors, and which require a syndemic approach.
The programme aims to increase operational and logistical capacity of IPK and INHEM, advance institutional and individual capability for diagnostic and molecular surveillance of infectious diseases, and to establish a data science platform to digitalise (routine) data, render them available and improve data use in public healh interventions. This lays the foundation to conduct research on control of emerging/epidemic viral diseases, detecting and preventing drug resistance in tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, non-communicable diseases and the interplay between infectious and non-infectious diseases.
The programme also provides extensive training through post-graduate courses (e.g. quantitative and mixed methods designs, data for action), and allowing to include scientists working at different levels of the Cuban health system in international PhD tracks. Finally, research activities will feed into existing and new collaborative networks including universities, stakeholders from the Ministry of Health and wider networks in Latin America.
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