MRC VISITING FELLOWS

Every year, the Mycetoma Research Centre, offers young researchers training opportunity to gain clinical knowledge about mycetoma and carry out research as part of the fellowship program. In this, the MRC hopes to encourage young researchers to conduct research and to encourage talented researchers to pursue a research career in mycetoma, a field that has been neglected for so long.

This year, the MRC hosted two groups of students for the fellowship program; the first group from the UK and the second was from the USA.

The first group included Dr. Mustafa Abbas and Dr. Peter Scolding who hold MBBS from the University College of London (UCL). They spent three weeks in April 2016 and participated in all of the centre’s activities. Dr. Mustafa has interest in intensive care and tropical medicine and Dr. Peter Scolding who is interested in International Health conducted a research on disability among mycetoma patients. They were able to publish a case report on mycetoma of the shoulder.

The second group included Dr. Mehreen Qureshi who holds a master degree in Global Health Leadership and Dr. Ezra Jerome who holds a master in Community and International Health from New York University (NYC). They spent two weeks in August 2016 during which they joined our medical trip to the Sinner area. They trained a group of medical students on the application of CommCare.

CommCare is an open source mobile health platform which consists of two main technology components: CommCare Mobile and CommCareHQ. CommCare enables easy electronic data collection, decision support, and patient/case management. They adjusted the application to be able to conduct household and individual surveys in an endemic mycetoma area to create a mycetoma database. This will help in gathering as much information and conduct further environmental and clinical research on mycetoma and other neglected diseases.