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Te Niwha has five Research Priority Areas, drawn from our Charter. These areas are part of ensuring our commitment to ensuring Aotearoa New Zealand's preparedness for ongoing and emerging infectious disease threats.
Most countries, including NZ, had pandemic plans pre-COVID-19 that focused on an Influenza Pandemic – but they were largely silent on non-Influenza virus pandemics. Future pandemic preparedness needs to more explicitly consider a range of possible pandemic agents or pandemic scenarios.
Rapid point-of-use (POU) diagnostics are going to change the paradigm of laboratory testing for infectious diseases.
Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB) is one of the most common serious bacterial infections seen in Aotearoa New Zealand. A conservative estimate for the incidence of SAB in the country is around 1100 people per year, which is amongst the highest reported in the developed world.
Testing of sewage for the presence of infectious disease, known as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), is used to assess disease burden in communities without the need for individualised testing. It allows for cost-effective, non-invasive and unbiased disease screening of whole communities, and can be deployed in areas traditionally underserved by healthcare surveillance.
Currently, we have very few approved antivirals or vaccines available for the many viral pathogens that threaten our health. For the few viruses where we do have approved antivirals available, we are facing increasing drug-resistance and constant viral evolution continues to create new challenges to ensure our vaccines and antivirals remain effective. Therefore, it is essential to develop new safe and effective antiviral therapies. We need to use our scientific tools and local expertise to develop our own therapeutic strategies to actively protect our own people. Additionally, we need broad-spectrum antivirals in our toolkit to use as a first line of defence against any emerging novel viruses to give us time to develop and test vaccines for prevention.
This project has strong potential to inform local and national preventative measures when integrated with other surveillance systems.
The current vaccination guidelines provide non-specific advice for needle length selection, and only 2% of COVID-19 vaccine doses in Aotearoa New Zealand (A/NZ) are actually administered with a needle longer than 25 mm.
This project aims to establish a Māori-led audit and surveillance programme for drinking water systems on marae in the Ngāi Tahu takiwā; estimate the burden of AGI attributable to community drinking water supplies in Aotearoa that assesses differences by ethnicity and deprivation; assist Taumata Arowai to estimate the potential health and equity benefits of improvements to community drinking water infrastructure.
Vibrio infections present as gastroenteritis or tissue infections that can be mild or very serious. These bacteria live naturally in aquatic environments and people become infected from eating contaminated kaimoana (seafood) or coming into contact with contaminated water.
At present there is no standard to both guide antibiotic prescribing and measure the appropriateness of treatment. While we know there are marked inequities in the rates of infections for Māori and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa, very little is known about the inequities in infection treatment. Our solution: We plan to develop a national antibiotic guideline in Aotearoa that sets out the optimal treatment of infections.
Traditional randomised clinical trials take too long for design, approval, and completion to be able to respond to pandemic infectious diseases threats. REMAP-CAP represents an innovation where an established learning healthcare platform trial, asking questions about respiratory tract infections between pandemics, can adapt quickly to respond to new respiratory infectious diseases.
