Australian High Commissioner Visit PNGIMR Headquaters | PNGIMR getting ready for 40th Anniversary | PNGIMR recieves K35M for research | Professor Siba meets with IRB of UHC MC in USA | Professor Siba meets visits PNGIMR Madang | First EHP HIV/AIDS Stakeholders meeting | 18 graduate as HIV counselors | The Flame of HIV/AIDS-Speech by Gerald Saleu | This quater in Pictures | Grace attends workshop in Melbourne | Mr Tavul attends workshop in Cambodia | PNGIMR celebrates openday with DWU | PNGIMR joins DWU to celebrate open day in picture |Staff graduate from UPNG |Visitors |Staff going Finish |New Staff |Community Service

Click here to download this newsletter in PDF format (240kB)

VISITORS

Sam Salman

Mr Sam Salman is a medical student from the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Sam was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to Australia when he was three years old.

He came to PNG in February this year and is helping the PNGIMR team in Alexishafen in doing Pharmaceutical studies on the new antimalarial drugs in children and pregnant women.

These studies look to what extent drugs are absorbed, distributed and excreted in the body.

He has taken time off from normal studies to do two years of research in the field of malaria and will be going to and from PNG within the two years.

“It’s nice working with the PNGIMR especially the team at Alexsihafen. They treat me like one of their family. In Alexishafen the team work very hard work and we are very busy sometimes but they always make sure there is a friendly and lighthearted atmosphere,” he said.

Dr Thomas Schulz comes from Australia and is here in Papua New Guinea with PNGIMR for three months to assist in the new Malaria GEN project based at the Modilon General Hospital in Madang.

PNGIMR news caught up with him in Madang and this is what he said about his trip to Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea is a nice place. People here are very friendly and it’s a beautiful and interesting country, interesting culture and interesting scientifically in terms of malaria.

I have come from the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Melbourne and I’m here for three months to assist a study coalition with the severe malaria project.

I am just here for a short period. There’s another study coalition Lawrence Manning who’s coming for a lot longer time. His coming in July and will be here for at least two years.

The Severe Malaria project is really asking the question ‘why do some children get really sick with malaria and other children do not’ and it’s a part of a study with twenty different sites around the world looking at the genetics of children with severe malaria and finding controls from the community who have mild malaria and comparing the genetics of all these children.
And Malaria GEN is this collaboration, which is coming out of Cambridge University and that’s coordinating all the trials in different countries and I think they look more where different malaria research has been done and where people have offered to be involved in the study.

Other parts of the world where the study is carried out are in African countries like, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal and South East Asian countries namely Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam.

Developed countries where the research is happening are the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy and they are also all involved in the study and most importantly Papua New Guinea.

So the study in Madang goes for three years, it started last year in October 2006 and carries on till October 2009.

And we’re trying to get over 300 cases of severe malaria from the coastal areas of PNG that come to Modilon hospital.

Then for each case of malaria we have controls. We have controls with severe diseases that are not malaria, we have controls with mild malaria in the community and we have two well controls. That’s briefly what Severe Malaria GEN is doing.

And I think PNGIMR is doing really good research in PNG. I think the quality of what they do is very good and they do a lot of research that’s really quite diverse.

I’m really involved in the vector borne diseases part of things but there’s other things as well with filaraisis and pneumonia and lots of other studies also.