Research Posters

About 10% of infants require some assistance to establish regular respirations at birth [1] sometimes leading to an inadequate intake of oxygen by the infant called perinatal asphyxia. Here, hypoxic–ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) due to acute perinatal asphyxia remains an important cause of neurodevelopmental deficits in childhood [2]. The first effective treatment for moderate to severe HIE is therapeutic hypothermia (TH) that has reduced death and disability [3,4]. However, a significant subset of mild HIE who are currently not recognized or offered any therapies develop cognitive impairment [5]. Here, a “Neurovascular Unit” approach [6] in newborns with HIE has been proposed to identify infants at risk for abnormal outcomes [7]. We are developing computational tools for a low-cost portable brain scanner to capture the neurovascular coupling (NVC) within the “Neurovascular Unit” [8].

Oxygen therapy is an essential part of emergency neonatal care that can provide great benefit to neonates suffering from hypoxia (1).  However, the use of oxygen therapy in neonates comes with risks. In the post-World War II era retinopathy of prematurity in premature infants was a leading cause of blindness in Europe and North America, with unmonitored oxygen therapy as the major risk factor (2). Some have argued that we are now in another epidemic of retinopathy of prematurity, occurring due to the rampant unmonitored oxygen therapy on premature infants in low and low-middle income countries (3).  In this pragmatic review, we aim to evaluate the peer-reviewed literature of low and low-middle income countries to summarize the state of neonatal oxygen therapy, identify areas of needed quality improvement, and identify where further research is needed.

The neighborhood context is important for cognitive and behavioral development in children. It is unclear what neighborhood-based challenges are unique to Montevideo, Uruguay. We used photovoice and interviews to empower parents:

•City and regional food systems are essential to creating equitable, livable, and healthy communities. Recognizing the potential of city and regional food systems, local governments around the world are beginning to develop, enact, and implement policies to strengthen food systems.

Infections by the pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans cause hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in the context of HIV infection in resource-poor areas of the world. Existing drugs are ineffective and access is limited. Our interests lie in strategies to augment the activity of existing antifungal drugs.

Childhood Diarrhea Facts

About half of the stroke survivors are left with some degree of disability. Innovative methodologies for restorative neurorehabilitation are urgently required to reduce long-term disability. The cause of stroke is characterized by the obstruction of blood flow to the brain thereby hindering the supply of oxygen and nutrients. About half of the stroke survivors are left with some degree of disability. One significant feature of the nervous system is the neuroplasticity which is involved in post-stroke functional disturbances, but also in rehabilitation. Beneficial neuroplastic changes may be facilitated with metabolic changes which is reflected in the hemodynamic response due to the neurovascular coupling. Thus, imaging the brain serves as a promising translatable tool to enhance the understanding of the brain functionalities during rehabilitation. We are developing a computational tool for low cost neuroimaging during a virtual reality (VR)-based exergaming platform to capture the neurovascular coupling during stroke rehabilitation.

Globally nearly half the instances of infertility are the result of a male condition. Yet, reproductive health research has tended to focus on female experiences. Research here presents narratives of infertility and treatment seeking in regions of Middle-East, Africa, and South Asia and discusses men’s experiences and perspectives. Male experiences of infertility often include instances of shame, disintegration of relationships, economic vulnerability in face of childlessness, mental health concerns, and feelings of inadequacy. Additionally, we see how while fertility treatments for men may have increased chances of achieving biological kinship for some, these techniques have also increased anxieties related to infidelity or kinship especially if using donor sperm or ICSI. Thus, biomedical treatments are not always culturally ‘effective’ and researchers advocate for traditional forms of treatment that alleviate emotional distress.

United Youth is a mentoring program that facilitates mutually beneficial relationships between newly arrived, high school aged refugee students and role-model refugee students of the same background from their community.

Household air pollution causes nearly four million premature deaths per year, primarily among poor women and children in low- and middle-income countries (Rosenthal et al., 2017, Lim et al. 2012). Transitions away from solid fuels improve indoor air quality, directly benefitting the health of women and children in the first two years of life. It remains unclear how to catalyze widespread and sustained fuel transitions, despite countless fuel transition case studies at the local level. This proposal will use mixed methods to identify enabling environments for household fuel transitions by examining both successful and unsuccessful transition attempts.

Human exposure to As and its compounds occurs primarily through ingestion of As-contaminated food and water. About 200 million people worldwide are exposed to As levels exceeding the international limit of 10 µg/L in water. Among children, exposure to As is associated with deficits in intelligence, neurobehavioral function, and development.

•Unclear if arsenic is neurotoxic at low levels of exposure.

Children and adults with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) experience health care inequities, such as difficulty accessing 

The purpose of this program is to enable UB students to understand a different system of public health by studying Brazil’s free, universal public health system. Brazilian students are also given the opportunity to study the U.S. system of health care.

As the producers of most of the food for consumption across the Global South, smallholder farmers are vital to the food security of millions of people around the world. Yet, the future of their livelihoods is growing increasingly uncertain, as planning and policies often ignore the needs of smallholder farmers (Altieri, Funes-Monzonte, & Peterson, 2012).

Because children experience rapid developmental changes in early life, many factors can effect their development. Unfavorable environments in the home can contribute to unfavorable outcomes during development. By using dust wipe analysis, predictors of metal exposure can be identified along with predicting biological outcomes in children.

Air pollutants emitted from “found wood” are often  associated with early infant mortality. Respirable components from wood smoke require collection and analysis to aid in the determination of mechanisms of biohazards and their elimination.

•World Health Organization (WHO) estimates a shortage of 12.9 million health care workers (HCWs) by the year 2035, an increase from 7.2 million in 2013.

•Refugees have been resettled in the Buffalo region for over the past ten years.

The Community of Excellence in Global Health Equity (CGHE) has partnered with the UB Academies (now the Experiential Learning Network) and academic units ranging from Romance Languages and Literatures to Civil Engineering to integrate the scholarship of CGHE faculty into the academic lives of UB’s undergraduates. Academic programs, co-curricular activities, and mentoring all help undergraduates translate classroom learning into lived experience.

Water variability poses challenges to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Farmers must constantly adapt their decisions and practices in response to water uncertainty and variability. This study probes the question, “How do peri-urban farmers adapt their farming decisions to variability and uncertainties in water availability, and how are these decisions embedded within the broader logics of appropriateness and consequentiality? We address this question by focusing on farmers within the Ashaiman delta, Ghana. In this empirical case, we develop indices to quantify the adaptive nature of decisions made by farmers to manage water variability and uncertainty.

•Unethical promotion of antibiotics

The World Health Organization has identified indoor air pollution as a major health concern in developing countries. We conducted a systematic review to characterize the relationship between indoor air pollution and maternal and newborn health outcomes to the extent they have been explored in the existing literature.

•Refugees from Burma are the single largest refugee group resettled in the USA over the past decade

Vernacular homes in the rural village of Devgain, Jharkhand, India display the deep connection that villagers have with the surrounding environment. Homes are constructed using local, natural (and mostly free) resources. The traditional form of housing consists of mud walls, clay roof tiles, and timber frames. This design responds effectively to the hot, tropical climate.However, homes face rapid deterioration from erosion each rainy season, along with other issues of water and property damage –leading to frequent, time-consuming, and labor-intensive maintenance –which, if neglected, can cause greater issues of health and safety. Changing climatic conditions and ambivalent weather patterns have exacerbated these conditions, and residents cannot keep up. About 90% of families sustain themselves through agriculture -many being subsist farmers. Yields have dropped at alarming rates due to the rapidly changing climatic conditions. Recurring heavy losses leave farmers under mounting debt.[1]

Global Surgery:

Scholarship on international trade and health analyzes the effects of trade and investment policies on population exposure to non-nutritious foods. These policies are linked to the nutrition transition, or the dietary shift towards meat and processed foods associated with rising overweight and obesity rates in low- and middle-income countries.

Communication is an essential component of all global public health work and research. Communities all over the world have different methods of communication, and levels of trust in regards to who provides health information. It’s still unclear what sources are deemed credible and trustworthy by Ugandan community members (Omona & Mukuye, 2012). This research discusses the most common methods and networks used to relay public health information about water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) throughout Uganda. These surveys also assessed whether WaSH messaging includes information for various vulnerable groups. This data was then used to create a communication protocol for the ATC, a Ugandan WaSH agency. Survey results indicate that the important networks for water and sanitation information included government workers, doctors, NGOs, religious institutions and schools. The most common methods of communication regarding water and sanitation were person-to-person verbal contact, radio, television, newspapers and ‘village radios.’ Approximately 50% reported that water and sanitation messaging included information for the vulnerable groups. Networks that were trusted to convey information about menstrual hygiene included doctors, government workers and schools. Menstrual hygiene communication methods included television, radio, posters and ‘village radios.’ Approximately two-thirds of people said menstrual hygiene information included messaging for the various vulnerable groups. Person-to-person verbal communication was reported to be the most highly preferred method of communication.

• Electronic waste (E-waste) is a globalenvironmental and health inequity issue

This pilot study investigates the water quality of traditional water structures in the western Deccan Plateau and potential for their revitalization. 18 quantitative water quality measurements are converted into a single water quality index (WQI). WQI assists in comparison of qualitative site information. Results indicate that WQI amongst traditional water structures was similar to domestic drinking sources, indicating their potential for domestic and agricultural water usage. Further research into sociopolitical practices and sampling of more sites will help understand traditional structures’ potential as sustainable water sources.

Over 380 million smallholder farmers produce more than 70% of the food in the global south, and are responsible for more than 50% of the food produced globally. Yet many smallholder farmers struggle under the pressure of globalizing economic and political environments. The report seeks to provide guidance on how local governments and planners can step into food systems planning, particularly in the Global South. Much of the current literature on food systems planning centers on experiences in the Global North, and little fits the contexts, experiences, opportunities, and challenges of communities in the Global South.

The world’s newest country, South Sudan, has experienced international and domestic conflicts since its secession from the Republic of Sudan in 2011. Fighting began in early July 2016 forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee to Kenya, Sudan, and other regions within South Sudan, but primarily Uganda. 

Small-holder farmers in the Global South are diverse, vulnerable, and often poor and food-insecure [1, 2].  To cope with the challenges, they sometimes intensify and diversify their use of land by having fruit and vegetable kitchen gardens, tree crops, fish-ponds and cattle, which can lead to improvements in food production and increase access to safe and nutritious food [3, 4]. Fine-grained data does not exist on agricultural practices sufficient to understand at a village or even subnational scale small-holder farmers’ health and food security, in part, because previous studies utilized insufficiently detailed satellite images [5], farmer interviews, and crop-cutting surveys [6] designed mainly to estimate crop yields. Google Street View can offer a high-resolution cross-sectional snapshot of the diversity of foods available in rural villages. Understanding “own production” even from home gardens is important as it can account for a third of caloric intake in agricultural households [6].

About half of the stroke survivors are left with some degree of disability. Innovative methodologies for restorative neurorehabilitation are urgently required to reduce long-term disability. Neuroplasticity is involved in post-stroke functional disturbances, but also in rehabilitation. Cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (ctDCS) produces polarity specific effects by polarizing the Purkinje cells thereby affecting the activity in the deep cerebellar output nuclei. These effects on distant plasticity in human cortical areas (i.e., the motor cortex) are explainable by the cerebellar role in modulating sensory processing. Determination of the induced electric field during ctDCS is crucially important for a better understanding of the effects. Modeling studies have shown that the ctDCS electric field distribution reaches the human cerebellum where the posterior and the inferior parts of the cerebellum are particularly susceptible [1]. However, an objective lobular atlas-based analysis of subject-specific electric field distribution during ctDCS was not found in the published literature. CLOS pipeline can be leveraged to optimize electromagnetic stimulation to target cerebellar lobules related to different cognitive and motor functions.

Many rural regions of Africa are characterized by extensive individual-level multilingualism. A typical adult may speak several local languages, as well languages of wider communication such as French or English. Little is known about how language choice affects the reception and understanding of messages related to health in these parts of the world.

A school-level map of inclusive WaSH facilities offers valuable insights to students with special needs, general public, policy makers and funding agencies. Creation of such map requires extensive data collection with periodic feedback. Our research work explores the feasibility of such mapping and monitoring of inclusive WaSH facilities at schools in developing nations.

According to the United Nations, adequate access to clean and safe water is recognized to be a human right, but globally, many individuals are denied their basic rights. Villagers who reside in a rural area  in India are unaware of the risk and diseases related to poor drinking-water access, unimproved sanitation, and poor hygiene practices. Our project worked to develop a solution to bridge the gap between health/sanitation awareness among the villagers.