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Asha Rosemary Jeffrey Bowen Wyber Cannon BA MBBS DCH FRACP PhD GAICD FAHMS OAM MBChB MPH FRACGP PhD BSc(Hons) BBus PhD Head, Healthy Skin and ARF
Globally, acute respiratory infections (ARIs) are a leading cause of childhood morbidity and mortality. While ARI-related mortality is low in Australia, First Nations infants are hospitalised with ARIs up to nine times more often than their non-First Nations counterparts.
The social determinants of health such as access to income, education, housing and healthcare, strongly shape the occurrence of acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease at the household, community and national levels.
Antibiotic consumption can lead to antimicrobial resistance and microbiome imbalance. We sought to estimate global antibiotic consumption for sore throat, and the potential reduction in consumption due to effective vaccination against group A Streptococcus.
Australian children and adolescents were among the last local cohorts offered COVID-19 vaccines. Despite promising initial uptake, coverage subsequently plateaued, requiring further efforts to improve access and build parents’ recognition of the importance of COVID-19 vaccination.
Adaptive clinical trials have designs that evolve over time because of changes to treatments or changes to the chance that participants will receive these treatments. These changes might introduce confounding that biases crude comparisons of the treatment arms and makes the results from standard reporting methods difficult to interpret for adaptive trials. To deal with this shortcoming, a reporting framework for adaptive trials was developed based on concurrently randomised cohort reporting.
Despite evidence supporting earlier discharge of well-appearing febrile infants at low risk of serious bacterial infection (SBI), admissions for ≥48 hours remain common. Prospective safety monitoring may support broader guideline implementation.
Recurrences of herpes simplex virus (HSV) in the orofacial region (herpes labialis or cold sores) impact quality-of-life. We aimed to study whether the bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine can attenuate cold sore recurrences through off-target immunomodulatory effects.
Asthma is among the commonest noncommunicable diseases of childhood and often occurs with other atopic comorbidities. A previous case-control study found evidence that compared to children who received acellular pertussis (aP) vaccines in early infancy, children who received one or more doses of whole-cell pertussis (wP) vaccine had lower risk of developing IgE-mediated food allergy. We hypothesized that wP vaccination in early infancy might protect against atopic asthma in childhood.
Multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants have emerged over the COVID-19 pandemic. The implications for COVID-19 severity in children worldwide are unclear. The objective was to determine whether the dominant circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) were associated with differences in COVID-19 severity among hospitalized children.