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Cambridge researchers are supporting a project to 3D-print face shields and face masks in Malawi. ̽��ֱ��work is helping them create a 'blueprint' for using digital fabrication technologies in future emergencies.

A cost-effective phone-based system developed by a Cambridge researcher and her Ugandan colleagues to support HIV patients has been rapidly adapted by the team to help the Ugandan Ministry of Health monitor those in quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Without trust, we don’t flatten the curve,” says Sharath Srinivasan, whose work in developing countries has given him an acute insight into how people’s worldviews and perspectives affect who and what they choose to trust. Through a new communications tool he’s helping to engage communities in Somalia so that COVID-19 risks are communicated effectively and rumours are quashed.

How Cambridge researcher Dr Ebele Mogo helped tackle a coronavirus public health language gap across Africa in four weeks and 18 languages with 30 crowdsourced volunteers.

“Cambridge’s infectious diseases community is making a huge contribution to tackling the pandemic,” says Professor James Wood. He leads several large-scale programmes at the ̽��ֱ�� that rely on his research expertise: infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans. This is, he says, a research area that was ‘colossally neglected’ before COVID-19 emerged.

Millions of the world’s poorest children are leaving school without mastering even basic levels of reading or maths because of an overlooked pattern of widespread, wealth-based inequalities in their countries’ education systems, new research suggests.

‘First-generation learners’ – a substantial number of pupils around the world who represent the first generation in their families to receive an education – are also significantly more likely to leave school without basic literacy or numeracy skills, a study suggests.

“Complex social, political, economic and ecological forces not only drive infectious disease emergence, but increase our susceptibility to epidemics when they occur,” says Freya Jephcott. Her interdisciplinary approach considers the science of disease outbreaks alongside the beliefs and practices of public health professionals - and how these influence the efficiency of outbreak responses.

Simple, low-cost ventilation designs and configuration of wards can reduce the dispersal of airborne virus in emergency COVID-19 hospitals, say Cambridge researchers.

“We have been expecting a pandemic like this for nearly twenty years,” says Olivier Restif, who uses mathematical modelling to understand how infectious diseases spread within and across species. In the midst of a global pandemic that began when one person was infected by one wild animal, he is keen to draw attention to the importance of using research to be better prepared.