Grant Boosts Antimicrobial Resistance Efforts in Malawi
February 18, 2020
Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases
The Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and UNC Project-Malawi were awarded a $4.5 million grant by the U.K.’s Fleming Fund to strengthen Malawi’s One Health Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) program. The grant will support the national AMR coordination committee and technical working groups, supporting ownership and alignment and scaling up a One Health AMR mentoring scheme.
In the human health sector, the grant will support the further implementation of the national AMR surveillance strategy, focusing on the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory and designated surveillance sites to improve laboratory performance, data quality, biosafety and biosecurity, and to encourage greater clinical engagement with microbiology services to drive demand for diagnostic bacteriology services.
The grant aims to support Malawi in developing a quality assured surveillance system to enable full implementation of the World Health Organization’s Global AMR Surveillance System. In the animal health sector, the grant will facilitate the implementation of a national surveillance strategy, helping laboratories improve quality, biosafety and biosecurity, and data management, and developing surveillance strategies to ensure representative, good quality surveillance sampling in relevant animal populations.
Grant activities will be led by UNC Project-Malawi lab co-directors Robert Krysiak and Gerald Tegha and on the UNC campus by Irving Hoffman, international director for UNC Project-Malawi.