Emily Nightingale

We observed that individuals living outside of known endemic foci experienced longer delays to diagnosis, suggesting that pursuing efficiency with increasingly targeted surveillance effort may allow sporadic cases in peripheral areas to perpetuate transmission undetected 🔎

Visceral leishmaniasis can be challenging to diagnose, meaning people can suffer symptoms and perpetuate transmission for months before accessing treatment. We explored how such delays can vary not only by individual characteristics but also over space, relative to where interventions are targeted 🎯

Pleased to say that the last paper from my PhD thesis is finally published in BMC Global and Public Health 🎉 🌏
Took a long while to get this one over the line, so thanks to all my co-authors for their commitment to the cause!
rdcu.be/epER8

Perceived Gender Equitable Norms and Previous Tuberculosis Testing in Malawi: A Secondary Analysis of a Cluster-based Prevalence Survey Substantial evidence demonstrates that men have a higher prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) and decreased use of TB services compared to women. Gender roles and norms contribute to these disparities by i...

New pre-print on perceptions of #gender equitable norms and #TB testing history in Malawi, led by @elizabeth-digi.bsky.social with @esnightingale.bsky.social @petermacp.bsky.social Helena Feasey, Rebecca Soko, Vincent Phiri, Liz Corbett @kchorton.bsky.social

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint (with all pre-print caveats!) tinyurl.com/589ffhu4 on Mtb infection risk by sex & age.
Men are at higher risk of #tuberculosis v women- but unclear how much driven by higher infection vs progression to disease. We meta-analysed Mtb immunoreactivity surveys to find out more🧵 #tbsky

More recently I've been thinking a lot about surveillance processes and elimination - whether we have the right statistical tools to maximise the potential of innovative approaches such as wastewater surveillance.

Spatial variation in delayed diagnosis of visceral leishmaniasis in Bihar, India Background Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a debilitating disease and without treatment, a fatal disease which burdens the most impoverished communities in northeastern India. Control and ultimately, e...

...and links to subsequent investigation of the spatial bias induced in delayed diagnosis as a result of targeted surveillance effort:
doi.org/10.1101/2024...

A spatio-temporal approach to short-term prediction of visceral leishmaniasis diagnoses in India Author summary This paper demonstrates a statistical modelling approach for forecasting of monthly visceral leishmaniasis (VL) incidence at block level in India, which could be used to tailor control ...

This follows on from earlier work forecasting VL diagnoses at the coarser, sub-district level: journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Estimating village incidence using a disaggregation approach was no better than simply applying the observed areal rates to each constituent village, suggesting that patterns on this spatial scale really need to be understood from data collected directly at that level.

This was a rare opportunity to compare disaggregation estimates against data observed at the finer scale, but we found that the village-targeted surveillance process for VL meant that accuracy was still challenging to interpret.

Thanks to @statsforbios.bsky.social for sharing our paper that's finally out! This is work from my PhD with @grahammedley.bsky.social and Oliver Brady, exploring the accuracy of spatial disaggregation for understanding local-level incidence of visceral leishmaniasis in northeast India.

It's a very recent development so don't worry! Been deliberating the value of joining after having freed myself from the "other" place... 🐤