Exploring Development of a Birth Cohort to Understand and Prevent Disease of Children in the Developing World

Introduction

Exploring Development of a Birth Cohort to Understand and Prevent Disease of Children in the Developing World was an Exploratory Workshop, funded by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, awarded to Principal Investigator David Speert, Pediatrics.

In many parts of the developing world, more than 70% of childhood deaths occur in the first year of life, and annually 10.6 million children die before the age of five years. Many of these deaths are preventable and are due to poverty, lack of access to health care and a very high rate of transmissible infectious diseases. Although social factors play a major role in the high mortality in the developing world, many illnesses occur for no obvious reason and are therefore very hard to predict and prevent. The goal of the proposed workshop for a birth cohort study is to identify the factors, both genetic and environmental, which predispose to potentially fatal disease in childhood. Armed with the new knowledge from the eventual study, it should be possible to devise effective strategies to address the major problem of childhood mortality in the developing world.

The purpose of the workshop is to gather experts from a range of specialties at and outside of UBC (Cape Town, Canada, Sweden) to lay the plans for developing an ambitious and unique, collaborative research project in South Africa. We wish to establish a birth cohort study in which 10,000 children will be investigated from birth until 20 years of age. Genetic, epidemiological and environmental assessments will be performed on the entire cohort.

The basic question we wish to address with the proposed ambitious study is: why do some children become ill, but others remain healthy, when all are exposed to the same potentially disease-causing conditions. We will test the Hypothesis that specific factors, both endogenous and exogenous, predict susceptibility to illness in childhood. Such factors can be identified by intensively evaluating all infants in a defined geographical area and then following each child for acquisition of specific illnesses throughout childhood and early adulthood.