Antibiotic knowledge, attitudes, and practices: new insights from cross-sectional rural health behaviour surveys in low- and middle-income South-East Asia

Introduction: Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are crucial in the global response to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), but diverse health systems, healthcare practices, and cultural conceptions of medicine can complicate global education and awareness-raising campaigns. Social research can help understand LMIC contexts but remains underrepresented in AMR research. Objective: To (1) describe antibiotic-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the general population in two LMICs and to (2) assess the role of antibiotic-related knowledge and attitudes on antibiotic access from different types of healthcare providers. Design: Observational study: cross-sectional rural health behaviour survey, representative on the population level. Setting: General rural population in Chiang Rai (Thailand) and Salavan (Lao PDR), surveyed between November 2017 and May 2018. Participants: 2141 adult members (≥18 years) of the general rural population, representing 712,000 villagers. Outcome measures: Antibiotic-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices across sites and healthcare access channels. Findings: Villagers were aware of antibiotics (Chiang Rai: 95.7%; Salavan: 86.4%; p<0.001) and drug resistance (Chiang Rai: 74.8%; Salavan: 62.5%; p<0.001), but the usage of technical concepts for antibiotics was dwarfed by local expressions like “anti-inflammatory medicine” in Chiang Rai (87.6%; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 84.9–90.0) and “ampi” in Salavan (75.6%; 95% CI: 71.4–79.4). Multivariate linear regression suggested that attitudes against over-the-counter antibiotics were linked to 0.12 additional antibiotic use episodes from public healthcare providers in Chiang Rai (95% CI: 0.01 – 0.23) and 0.53 in Salavan (95% CI: 0.16 – 0.90). Conclusions: Locally specific conceptions and counter-intuitive practices around antimicrobials can complicate AMR communication efforts and entail unforeseen consequences. Overcoming “knowledge deficits” alone will therefore be insufficient for global AMR behaviour change. We call for an expansion of behavioural AMR strategies towards “AMR-sensitive interventions” that address context-specific upstream drivers of antimicrobial use (e.g. unemployment insurance) and complement education and awareness campaigns

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Current accounts of antimicrobial resistance: stabilisation, individualisation and antibiotics as infrastructure.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the latest issues to galvanise political and financial investment as an emerging global health threat. This paper explores the construction of AMR as a problem, following three lines of analysis. First, an examination of some of the ways in which AMR has become an object for action-through defining, counting and projecting it. Following Lakoff's work on emerging infectious diseases, the paper illustrates that while an 'actuarial' approach to AMR may be challenging to stabilise due to definitional and logistical issues, it has been successfully stabilised through a 'sentinel' approach that emphasises the threat of AMR. Second, the paper draws out a contrast between the way AMR is formulated in terms of a problem of connectedness-a 'One Health' issue-and the frequent solutions to AMR being focused on individual behaviour. The paper suggests that AMR presents an opportunity to take seriously connections, scale and systems but that this effort is undermined by the prevailing tendency to reduce health issues to matters for individual responsibility. Third, the paper takes AMR as a moment of infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star) when antimicrobials and the work they do are rendered more visible. This leads to the proposal of antibiotics as infrastructure-part of the woodwork that we take for granted, and entangled with our ways of doing life, in particular modern life. These explorations render visible the ways social, economic and political frames continue to define AMR and how it may be acted upon, which opens up possibilities for reconfiguring AMR research and action

Exploring the mismatch between mobile phone adoption and use through survey data from rural India and China

Persistent disciplinary and methodological divides between technology diffusion and adoption studies and the study of use and engagement with technology raise obstacles to understanding the development implications of mobile technology diffusion, for example in the area of healthcare access. As quantitative assessments in the area of health and technology almost exclusively rely on binary indicators of mobile phone adoption, it is not clear whether this is indeed a reasonable proxy that does not obscure the distributional implications of mobile phone use. This paper therefore compares patterns of mobile phone adoption and utilisation using original survey data from rural India and China. “Utilisation” here is assessed through a simple yet novel multidimensional index. The paper further assesses the role of these concepts as determinants of locally emerging forms of mobile-phone-aided healthcare-seeking behavior (“health action”). The investigation uses descriptive statistical analysis and multilevel logistic regression analysis, which provide evidence in support of the claims that (a) patterns of mobile phone diffusion and utilisation are related yet incongruent, that (b) mobile phones facilitate health action in both field sites to a notable extent, and that (c) the mobile phone utilisation index is a better predictor for phone-aided health action than mobile phone adoption. In light of the superiority of the utilisation index vis-à-vis binary measures of mobile phone adoption, other researchers can apply the survey instrument and technology utilisation concept developed in this paper to support the analysis of the social implications of technology diffusion

Book Review: After access: inclusion, development, and a more mobile internet

Aided by the increasing availability of internet-enabled low-cost mobile phones, recent years have witnessed rapid growth in internet access – especially in low- and middle-income countries. As the constraint of availability vanishes, new questions emerge relating to how people engage with the (mobile) internet. This is the subject of Jonathan Donner’s latest book After Access, which documents and analyses the current state of mobile internet usage around the world. His global scope, analysis of the implications of internet use for livelihoods and participation, and interest in digital divides speak to the broader development community as well as to the specific disciplines of mobile communication studies and information and communication technologies and development (or “ICTD”)

Satellite-aided survey sampling and implementation in low- and middle-income contexts: a low-cost/low-tech alternative.

The increasing availability of online maps, satellite imagery, and digital technology can ease common constraints of survey sampling in low- and middle-income countries. However, existing approaches require specialised software and user skills, professional GPS equipment, and/or commercial data sources; they tend to neglect spatial sampling considerations when using satellite maps; and they continue to face implementation challenges analogous to conventional survey implementation methods. This paper presents an alternative way of utilising satellite maps and digital aides that aims to address these challenges.The case studies of two rural household surveys in Rajasthan (India) and Gansu (China) compare conventional survey sampling and implementation techniques with the use of online map services such as Google, Bing, and HERE maps. Modern yet basic digital technology can be integrated into the processes of preparing, implementing, and monitoring a rural household survey. Satellite-aided systematic random sampling enhanced the spatial representativeness of the village samples and entailed savings of approximately £4000 compared to conventional household listing, while reducing the duration of the main survey by at least 25 %.This low-cost/low-tech satellite-aided survey sampling approach can be useful for student researchers and resource-constrained research projects operating in low- and middle-income contexts with high survey implementation costs. While achieving transparent and efficient survey implementation at low costs, researchers aiming to adopt a similar process should be aware of the locational, technical, and logistical requirements as well as the methodological challenges of this strategy

Antibiotics and activity spaces: An exploratory study of behaviour, marginalisation, and knowledge diffusion [project overview]

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a top global health challenge, threatening to become the leading cause of death globally by 2050. Policies to tackle AMR recognise that human behaviour and medicine use are important, but the global health policy tools are insufficient. Not only are education and awareness campaigns insufficient to change behaviours fundamentally, but they might also delay more effective action to address structural factors of medicine use, like poverty, stress, hardship, and health system deficiencies. Considering the urgency of AMR action, this is a dangerous and costly omission. Our research calls for reimaging global health policy as development policy, recognising that AMR is only one among several symptom of deeper-rooted social problems. Antibiotics and Activity Spaces is a survey of 5,885 villagers in Chiang Rai (Thailand) and Salavan (Lao PDR) to better understand (1) how people access healthcare and what actually counts as “problematic” antibiotic use, (2) whether antibiotic-related information from educational activities spreads or simply evaporates in village community networks, and (3) whether there are simple “early warning” indicators (e.g. specific symptoms) to detect whether people are likely to have “problematic” antibiotic use. The surveys are currently being implemented by 10-member survey teams in each country and expected to be finished in April 2018. This project is funded by the Antimicrobial Resistance Cross Council Initiative supported by the seven research councils in partnership with the Department of Health and Department for Environment Food &amp; Rural Affairs (grant ref. ES/P00511X/1, administered by the UK Economic and Social Research Council)

The place of technology in the capability approach

Increasing scholarly attention has focussed on how to integrate technology within the Capability Approach (CA), yet without a consistent solution. While some positions in the CA literature describe technology as a special kind of capability input, others consider the concept of technology to be fundamentally different from that of an ordinary input. We aim to contribute to the theoretical development of the CA by offering a consistent justification for the explicit inclusion of technology in this framework. We propose that technical objects have a “generative” and a “transformative” dimension through which they enable capabilities directly and manipulate other inputs in the attainment of valued capabilities. The objects acquire the transformative dimension from the broader technological context, which we propose as a new class of conversion factors. Using the example of mobile phones and their role in healthcare access, we demonstrate that our proposal helps to frame the analysis of the development impact of technology.</p

Impact of high-intensity polio eradication activities on children’s routine immunisation status in Northern India

regression, controlling for other determinants of immunisation. The regression results show that the link is negative in Uttar Pradesh and positive in Bihar. Age-specific analysis shows that the positive association diminishes for older children in Bihar and that a negative association emerges and become increasingly pronounced for older children in Uttar Pradesh. This indicates that heterogeneous results emerge across two neighbouring states with similar programme intensity and suggests that the catch-up of unvaccinated older children may be a channel through which negative effects accrue. The method described in this paper, based on an analytical focus on individual-level programme exposure, can therefore help health policy implementers and evaluators to illuminate positive or negative interactions between a health intervention and a health system

The place of technology in the capability approach

Increasing scholarly attention has focussed on how to integrate technology within the Capability Approach (CA), yet without a consistent solution. While some positions in the CA literature describe technology as a special kind of capability input, others consider the concept of technology to be fundamentally different from that of an ordinary input. We aim to contribute to the theoretical development of the CA by offering a consistent justification for the explicit inclusion of technology in this framework. We propose that technical objects have a “generative” and a “transformative” dimension through which they enable capabilities directly and manipulate other inputs in the attainment of valued capabilities. The objects acquire the transformative dimension from the broader technological context, which we propose as a new class of conversion factors. Using the example of mobile phones and their role in healthcare access, we demonstrate that our proposal helps to frame the analysis of the development impact of technology.</p