By bringing together scientists from different disciplines, including those involved with public health and animal health, the Health Impacts work package will contribute to a better understanding of linkages and mechanisms between disease transmission, disease diffusion, epidemics, and climate/environment variability and changes. It will start to lay down the foundation for the development of early warning systems to assist with epidemic reduction/prevention.

By bringing together scientists from different disciplines, including those involved with public health and animal health, the Health Impacts work package of the AMMA health project, will contribute to a better understanding of linkages and mechanisms between disease transmission, disease diffusion, epidemics, and climate/environment variability and changes. It will start to lay down the foundation for the development of early warning systems to assist with epidemic reduction/prevention.

Each field study needs to have its strategy on the number of collection points, what is being collected, how often these data are being collected and the analyses that are being carried out. Researchers also need to give some reflection on to what extent the set up is a compromise and if any changes would be made in future campaigns. All field experiments are a compromise – that is expected – but some insight to how any compromises impacted on the study will help in the design of future studies. We must remember other regions in Africa are looking to set up their own regional AMMA type experiments and are already asking for knowledge transfer in terms of best practise to come out of AMMA. This is a milestone where we can do something for this cause.