Engaging with community and experts in Accra

The Dust Bunny team run engagement workshops in the second week of February in Accra, Ghana. The workshops engaged with members of the community who are participating in the project as well as Ghanian external to the project public health experts and researchers.

It presented the preliminary findings (from the design ethnography and first round of microbiology analysis) and provided a space for feedback and debate. It also presented some of the challenges faced by the research team in conducting design-led research in Ghana and invited workshop participate in brainstorming sessions aimed at generating solutions .

Themes that emerged from the workshop related to the influence of cultural, religious practices and beliefs of different communities in the cleaning and hygiene practices employed across a range of households. Furthermore, there was discussion around the importance of establishing trust and rapport with household research participant prior to the fieldwork, especially given the morally bound nature of the research. In addition to this, the tables were turned with workshop participants asking questions to the research team and making suggestions for maximising the dissemination of findings.

Lastly, community members and experts alike were provided with dissemination material to take back to their respective communities.

Dust sample collection for microbiological study starting soon

This project has a microbiological component which seeks to assess the extent of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria attached to dust in Ghanaian homes. This is a problem as resistance, if found in infectious bacteria, may hinder treatment of infectious disease. However it may be lurking in non-infectious bacteria as well. No problem? Well there is… this resistance might be mobile and transfer from non-infectious to infections bacteria.   So we are going to assess the extent of AMR in all the bacteria we can. No matter which environment we look at there are common microbiological problems: We can culture bacteria directly from dust and we can test them for their resistance or sensitivity to a range of antibiotics commonly used in the treatment of infectious disease.

The sting is the tail is we can only culture usually less than 1% of all the bacteria present. The remaining >99% cannot be cultured but are still active, they may contain infectious bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. So how do were find these unculturable microbes?

Two strategies can be adopted in addition to culture: one for identifying bacteria and the other for identifying AMR. Both involve taking a dust sample and extracting all DNA from all the attached bacteria. For bacteria we will use next generation sequencing which generates signatures of bacterial species from which we can identify and quantify (within limits) species and this will tell us about bacterial diversity in a number of homes. For AMR, we will detect the signatures of different genes that will tell us which antibiotic resistances are present.

 

By combining the sequencing and culturing we will obtain a picture of AMR is different households.

*Photo Credit: Dr. Graham Beards, CC BY-SA