Publications by authors named "Richmond Gorman"
Viral encephalitis is a rare, yet severe neurological disorder. It poses a significant public health threat due to its high morbidity and mortality. Despite the disproportionate burden of the disease in impoverished African countries, the true extent of the problem remains elusive due to the scarcity of accurate diagnostic methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11 2020, by the World Health Organisation prompted the need for a sustained and a rapid international response. In a swift response, the Government of Ghana, in partnership with Zipline company, launched the use of Unmanned Automated Vehicles (UAV) to transport suspected samples from selected districts to two foremost testing centres in the country. Here, we present the experiences of employing this technology and its impact on the transport time to the second largest testing centre, the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR) in Kumasi, Ghana.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- A lot of money has been spent on studying the COVID-19 virus in Africa, leading to over 100,000 virus samples being analyzed to understand the spread of the disease.
- *More countries in Africa are now able to do these studies themselves, which helps them get results faster and keep a close watch on the virus.
- *To keep fighting COVID and other diseases, more funding and support for testing and research in Africa is really important for the future.
Background: Encephalitis is a serious disease of the brain characterized by prodromal and specific neurological symptoms. HIV infections offer opportunistic viruses, such as Varicella-zoster virus (VZV), the chance to cause encephalitis in patients. There is a lack of information on the genetic diversity of VZV in Ghana and other parts of Africa which requires sequencing and characterization studies to address.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Africa has varied significantly across countries, and its overall impact remains unclear.
- An analysis of 8,746 genomes from 33 African countries indicated that most outbreaks originated from Europe before international travel restrictions took effect.
- As the pandemic continued, increased movement and local transmission led to the emergence of several variants within Africa, emphasizing the need for a strong pandemic response on the continent to prevent becoming a source of new variants.
Following the detection of the first imported case of COVID-19 in the northern sector of Ghana, we molecularly characterized and phylogenetically analysed sequences, including three complete genome sequences, of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 obtained from nine patients in Ghana. We performed high-throughput sequencing on nine samples that were found to have a high concentration of viral RNA. We also assessed the potential impact that long-distance transport of samples to testing centres may have on sequencing results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- * To gather data, researchers analyzed records from 72,434 respiratory samples collected between February and July 2020, confirming SARS-CoV-2 infection through RT-PCR testing, and found that the infection rate was 13.2% overall.
- * Results indicated males had a slightly higher infection rate, young adults (21-30 years) were most affected, and symptoms like anosmia strongly predicted infection; the study also noted a gradual decline in the virus's reproductive number.