Chijioke Kaduru of Corona Management Systems in Nigeria will use a human-centered approach to develop a community theater production that showcases real stories to educate caregivers on the value of vaccinations and increase childhood vaccine coverage. Almost half of caregivers in Nigeria lack awareness of the value of vaccines, which has increased the incidence of childhood diseases. To address this, they will stimulate social change by showcasing aspects of immunization - identifying concerns and discussing potential solutions - in a community theater production based at the income and education level of caregivers. They will work with stakeholders including immunization teams, community health workers, women's groups, and religious leaders to develop the production. The cast will be made up of community members with real experiences, and performances will be held in public places, traditional meeting spaces, schools, and places of religious worship, and be recorded for future airing. By better engaging caregivers with their human-centered approach, they expect to generate a greater demand for immunization services.

Olukemi Amodu, Mofeyisara Omobowale and Folakemi Amodu of the University of Ibadan College of Medicine in Nigeria will develop a three-part intervention to provide more convenient and accessible vaccinations for children of working mothers to increase the timeliness and completion of childhood vaccinations. Despite education campaigns, the demand for childhood vaccination in Nigeria is low, partly because working mothers have limited time to attend vaccination clinics. The three-part intervention comprises priority and more convenient immunization services at existing clinics, mobile vaccine clinics for the many mothers who work long hours in the marketplace, and a smartphone-based application to send vaccine reminders. They will test their approach in the city of Ibadan by setting up mobile clinics at three market places to provide weekly vaccination services and education counseling for mothers in their own shops. These mothers will also be supported with a savings program (VaccoSavings) to help them track money saved to pay for vaccines not paid for by the government. They will also enable mothers working in the formal sector to book vaccine appointments at more convenient times at a child welfare center where they will be attended to promptly. All mothers with smartphones will be supported by the VaccApp application to track vaccine schedules and provide automatic reminders. The impact of these combined strategies on the demand for vaccinations will be evaluated after one year.

Jason Andrews of Stanford University in the U.S. will study the association between the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi and its bacteriophage in both aquatic environments and the human gastrointestinal tract to see if they influence geographic and seasonal disease outbreaks in Bangladesh. The ecology and evolution of many know bacterial pathogens including V. cholerae are affected by the viruses (bacteriophage) that infect them. Indeed, seasonal cholera epidemics are inversely correlated with phage prevalence in water. They will study this relationship in S. Typhi, which contaminates half of city water supplies in Bangladesh. They will generate a library of local phage strains infecting S. Typhi and use a computational approach to identify indicator S. Typhi strains that may be susceptible to these phage, which they will then test experimentally. They will also characterize the abundance and strains of phage in municipal water supplies, and in stool samples from typhoid cases, and compare these with clinical cases of typhoid to determine if they shape temporal and spatial patterns of typhoid.

Andrew Greenhill of Federation University Australia in Australia, along with partners at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, will use advanced environmental microbiology methods to study microbial community dynamics associated with survival of the typhoid fever-causing bacterium Salmonella Typhi in aquatic environments in Papua New Guinea. "Typhoid Mary" Mallon was an Irish-American cook, written into infectious disease folklore as the first asymptomatic carrier of S. Typhi. More than eighty years after her death, little is still known about how the bacteria persists in environmental niches such as contaminated water, which is a major route of disease transmission. They will collect and filter water samples from streams in areas where the disease is common over an eight-month period covering both wet and dry seasons and analyze the microbial communities within by qPCR. This will be combined with physiochemical parameters of the water (temperature, stream height, photosynthetic activity) collected using DIMPP - a low-cost, late-stage prototype suitable for use in low-resource environments - to build network models. These models will be used to identify mathematical connections between environmental factors, aquatic populations, and the presence of antibiotic resistance genes. These connections could be used to develop an early warning system for impending outbreaks.