IVI and Lao People’s Democratic Republic

 

Ongoing Collaboration

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance & Capacity Building: With support for UKAID’s Fleming Fund, IVI’s CAPTURA program is working with health authorities in 12 countries across central and southeast Asia (including Laos) to collect, review, and digitize AMR surveillance data. The project also helps identify gaps in data and areas for quality improvement that can be addressed in future initiatives to strengthen surveillance capacity. The information resource generated by the project will improve awareness, advocacy, policy, and interventions needed to combat AMR and antimicrobial misuse. 

 

Previous Collaboration

Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI)

Laos began working with the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) in 2003, when the nation participated in a disease burden study as part of the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI). 

 

Rotavirus Vaccine Program (RVP)

In 2003, Gavi, the Health Alliance approved the creation of the Accelerated Development and Introduction Plan (ADIP) for rotavirus vaccines to reduce the global burden of the rotavirus. This ADIP became the Rotavirus Vaccine Program (RVP). With funding from PATH and the RVP, IVI scientists worked to develop a protocol to conduct standardized hospital-based studies in Vientiane, Laos; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In 2005, pediatricians and public health agencies began enrolling children in these studies. In addition to enrolling suspected rotavirus cases into Laos’s hospital-based surveillance study, IVI scientists also supplied collaborators with the capacity to perform G and P typing for rotavirus strains and invited one local scientist to go through short term molecular virologic typing training at the University of Melbourne. In Laos, IVI collaborated with Mahosot Hospital, the National Institute of Public Health, and the Ministry of Health.

 

VAEIMS Program

IVI developed a software tool, the Vaccine Adverse Events Information Management System (VAEIMS) in collaboration with the WHO to facilitate the transfer of AEFI data from the periphery of a healthcare system into a central database for processing and analysis, as well as a global database. This will ultimately guide decision making at different levels of a country. The customized and upgraded version of VAEIMS has been deployed at a national level in four priority countries in the WHO Western Pacific Region – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Mongolia and Vietnam.