Exciting new publications by members of our project team!
Exciting new publications by members of our project team!
In the past few months, a number of publications by members of the Sinergia group have been released. They provide exciting new insights into their ongoing research, highlight Africa’s central role within the realm of global health, and make important interventions in scholarship of various disciplines addressing health-related issues. Linking public health, urban planning and African history, the publications deal with a diverse set of topics such as knowledge production and circulation, medical innovation, and urban landscapes and their impact on public health matters.
Examining African Contributions to Global Health: Reflections on Knowledge Circulation and Innovation
Septemper, 8th 2022
By Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, Tanja Hammel, Christian Burri, Jérôme Chenal, Günther Fink, Akuto Akpedze Konou, Eric Nébié, Doris Osei Afriyie, Vitor Pessoa Colombo, Jürg Utzinger and Julia Tischler in Global Public Health
“This article unites different disciplinary debates on ‘southern innovation’, ‘theory from the South’, and ‘decolonisation of knowledge’ in order to discuss existing understandings around the role of Africa in the production of health-related knowledge, public health policy, and medical innovation. Arguing that high-income countries have much to learn from the global South when it comes to health-related knowledge and practices, we propose an interdisciplinary research approach to uncovering and examining African contributions to global health, drawing on an ongoing collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.”
Glimpses into a History of Knowledge on the Antimalarial Lariam® in Zambia
August, 26th 2022
By Tanja Hammel in History of Knowledge
“More than 35 million Western travelers have consumed the antimalarial drug Lariam® or one of its generic equivalents. While the neuropsychiatric side effects have attracted a great deal of media attention in the Anglo-Saxon world, African health experts’ clinical trials and their knowledge production on the drug have not. To remedy this in a small way, this blog post opens a small window into a larger project on Zambian experts’ contributions to medical science, particularly concerning malaria treatments, and the way these contributions have been overlooked.”
«Les architectes ne réfléchissent pas à l’environnement»
August, 3rd 2022
Interview with Jérôme Chenal in L’Illustré
“Directeur à l’EPFL, actif dans 18 pays d’Afrique et en Suisse, l’architecte Jérôme Chenal lance un réquisitoire contre la gestion de nos villes, qui se moquent de l’environnement et en paient aujourd’hui le prix.”
Exploring Relations between Urban Landscapes and Diarrhoeal Diseases in Côte d’Ivoire
June, 23rd 2022
By Vitor Pessoa Colombo, Jérôme Chenal, Jürg Utzinger, Brama Koné and Martí Bosch in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
“Unlike water and sanitation infrastructures or socio-economic indicators, landscape features are seldomly considered as predictors of diarrhoea. In contexts of rapid urbanisation and changes in the physical environment, urban planners and public health managers could benefit from a deeper understanding of the relationship between landscape patterns and health outcomes. We conducted an ecological analysis based on a large ensemble of open-access data to identify specific landscape features associated with diarrhoea. Designed as a proof-of-concept study, our research focused on Côte d’Ivoire.”
