Geographies of Health in Place (GoHelP) lab, is pleased to invite you to engage with Dr. Buba Manjang, a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher, who will be speaking about his research addressing hygiene among mothers' weaning children.
Dr. Buba Manjang is Deputy-Director of Public Health in the Directorate of Public Health in the Gambia. He is a recipient of a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship and working on the Water Security as a Foundation for Healthy Communities and Sustainable Livelihoods project in the Faculty of Environment.
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Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (2018) indicates that unsafe drinking water, unsafe sanitation and lack of hygiene continue to be major contributors to global morbidity and mortality, resulting in about 870,000 deaths in 2016. These deaths were mainly caused by diarrhoeal diseases and intestinal nematode infections. This presentation describes an RCT-based intervention in rural Gambia designed to address a particularly important critical control point in childhood nutrition: improving mothers’ weaning food hygiene and handling practices. The public health, community-level intervention was effective in improving mothers’ compliance to hygienic weaning food handling practices in rural Gambia. There was reduced microbial contamination of weaning food contamination as well as lower diarrhea incidence and hospital admission.
About the speaker
Dr. Buba Manjang completed a BSc in Public and Environmental Health and worked for Ministry of Health, The Gambia 2005 to 2006 as Regional Vector Control Officer, later promoted to Senior Health Administrator. Buba then obtained scholarship funding in pursuance of his MSc degree in Public Health at National University of Malaysia which he successfully completed in 2008.
He joined the Ministry of Health in 2009 with a promotion as Regional Principal Public Health Officer until 2011 when he was promoted to the position of Principal Public Health officer. He won another scholarship from Islamic Development Bank, known as Merit Scholarship at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD, work for the Ministry of Health where he was promoted to the position of Deputy Director of Public Health at the Directorate of Public Health.
He is highly interested in community or public health intervention research, particularly in developing countries. He is focusing on Water, Hygiene, Sanitation and Health. Buba is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship (QEScholars) and will be working on the Water Security as a Foundation for Healthy Communities and Sustainable Livelihoods project. Specifically, he will be working on the effects of community-led total sanitation on water quality for the prevention of diarrhea in slum and rural communities.