John Njuma Libwea (Finland)
Tampere University
Epidemiology
John Njuma Libwea is a researcher and Senior Epidemiologist at Cameroon’s Public Health Emergency Operation Centre in Yaounde. He is an alumnus of the International Doctoral Programme in Epidemiology from the University of Tampere, Finland since 2014. He has worked with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), Cameroon’s Expanded Immunization Programme and the Research Centre for HIV/AIDS and Tropical diseases, Yaounde, Cameroon. His research interests are on the Epidemiology of priority diseases in resource-low settings, Vaccines, Antimicrobial resistance and stewardship. He is one of the principal investigator on PCV13 effect studies on under-five mortality, pneumococcal carriage and otitis media among children under-five years old in Cameroon. He has also conducted collaborative studies with both local and international partners including the Cameroon Academy of Sciences, THL and Pfizer. He has received the Young Investigator Award and Research grants from the International Society of Infectious Diseases, the University of Tampere and Pfizer. Further, he has also obtained competences on Infectious Disease Epidemiology (via the University of Tampere in collaboration with the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) in 2013, Vaccinology (via the University of Johannesburg, South Africa in collaboration with the Indian Advanced Vaccinology course (INDVAC) in 2016), Cancer Epidemiology via the Danish Cancer Registry in 2018 and Incident Management System via the One Health platform Cameroon, in 2020.

Presenter of 1 Presentation

 Conference Calendar

O020 - PNEUMOCOCCAL RESEARCH IN THE ERA OF COVID-19 IN CAMEROON: THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES (ID 737)

Session Name
0330 - Parallel Session 03: Pneumococcal Disease and Pneumonia in the Time of COVID-19 (ID 25)
Session Type
Parallel Session
Date
Mon, 20.06.2022
Session Time
15:20 - 16:35
Room
Grand Ballroom East
Presenter
Lecture Time
16:25 - 16:35

Abstract

Background

The 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) introduction into Cameroon’s expanded immunization programme in July 2011followed an accelerated primary dose series given at 6, 10 and 14 weeks of age. We reviewed the evaluation of the PCV13 programme, and the potential challenges in conducting future nasopharyngeal pneumococcal colonization (NPC) studies amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

.

Methods

We used findings from previous cross-sectional studies which assessed the prevalence of NPC, pneumococcal meningitis (PM) and otitis media (OM) among Cameroonian children under-five years old in the PCV13 era.

Results

Declines in the proportion of PM due to vaccine serotypes (VT) have been shown, mainly due to reductions of serotypes 6A/6B, 1, 19A, and 23F; as eleven of the PCV13 VTs remain in circulation. Furthermore, OM prevalence was unexpectedly higher among the PCV13-vaccinated group compared to those not vaccinated, due to the predominance of other pathogens and non-PCV13-type pneumococci as disease causing microbes or waning vaccine immunity among the vaccinated children or the absence of any indirect effects.

Conclusions

Ten years after PCV13 implementation in Cameroon, its impact evaluation remains incomplete. Remaining knowledge gaps include its evaluation on the incidence of all-cause paediatric pneumonia hospitalization among vaccinated and unvaccinated age-groups, as well as colonization rates on infant-adult pairs. But, our recent experience in conducting COVID-19 seroprevalence studies proves this may be challenging. Besides the challenges, we discuss how pneumococcal research could be re-contextualized in the era of COVID-19 operational research and beyond. Lessons learned on community engagement, improved laboratory network, understanding vaccine hesitancy to decision-making are vital.

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