Publications by authors named "R D Pullan"

Background: Soil-transmitted helminths (STH) affect approximately 1.5 billion people globally. The current STH control strategy is annual or twice-annual preventive chemotherapy, typically school-based deworming targeting children and women of reproductive age.

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Article Synopsis
  • School-based health services may inadvertently exclude children with disabilities, while community-based approaches provide a more inclusive option for addressing their needs.
  • The study focuses on assessing disability prevalence among children aged 5-17 in Malawi and compares the effectiveness of school-based deworming (SBD) versus community-based deworming (CBD) for treating soil-transmitted helminths in these children.
  • Findings show a 3.3% disability prevalence, mainly affecting hearing, remembering, and communication, with boys more likely to have disabilities, which corresponded with lower school attendance and poorer health outcomes.
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Integrated approaches to managing co-endemic neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) of the skin within primary healthcare services are complex and require tailoring to local contexts. We describe formative research in Atwima Mponua District in Ghana's Ashanti Region designed to inform the development of a sustainable intervention to improve access to skin NTD care. We employed a convergent, parallel, mixed-methods design, collecting data from February 2021 to February 2022.

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Observational evidence suggests that household floors may be an important domain for the transmission of enteric and parasitic infections. However, little work has been done to investigate how household floors can become contaminated with human and animal faeces. This study uses a mixed methods approach to postulate the proximal and distal determinants of household floor contamination with faeces in groups of rural villages in 3 counties in Kenya (Bungoma, Kwale and Narok).

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