The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has recently announced its grant recipients for 2016. Two Duke Kunshan research projects ‘ Dr. Abu Abdullah’s study on second-hand smoke exposure among young children in rural China, and Dr. Dong Di’s research project on ‘Rural Tuberculosis Patients’ Inpatient Service Utilization, Cost, Financial Burden and Their Determinants’, are among the winners of the prestigious fund awards.
About a third of the world’s smokers live in China, according to the World Health Organization, and an estimated 1 million Chinese die each year from tobacco-related illnesses. The high prevalence of current smoking among men in China (52.9%) suggest that a large number of young children are exposed to secondhand smoke at home. Children in the rural setting are even more exposed to secondhand smoke due to the lack of tobacco control policy initiative in the rural setting and the high prevalence of smoking among rural public.
With the funding support from NSFC, Dr. Abdullah, professor of global health at Duke Kunshan University’s Global Health Research Center (GHRC) and research professor of global health at Duke Global Health Institute, and his team members hope to find ways to minimize the adverse health effects of secondhand smoking on children, especially in rural China.
Dr. Abdullah and two GHRC research assistants – Gong Enying and Chen Shu, will work with colleagues in Fudan University in Shanghai and Taizhou Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (Zhejiang province), as well as researchers from Kunming Medical University (Yunnan), to obtain baseline data on secondhand smoke exposure among young children in the underdeveloped rural areas of Taizhou city (Zhejiang province) and Dali city (Yunnan province), then to test the effectiveness of intervention measures. Community health workers will counsel parents about the importance of not smoking in the vicinity of their infants and children, as well as offering help in trying to quit.
Dr. Abdullah expects the results of this study to provide clinical evidence for the development of community health worker-delivered interventions designed to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke and related morbidity and mortality among children in rural China. He believes that the successful results of this 4-year study might serve as the basis for intervention programs in other developing countries in the region with high burden of tobacco related diseases, such as India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Tuberculosis (TB) is another major health threat in rural China besides the high smoking prevalence, and Dr. Dong from Duke Kunshan’s GHRC hopes to shed some light on rural TB patients’ inpatient service utilization, cost, financial burden and their determinants in her grant winning study.
China has an estimated 5 million TB patients, and the country is still facing many challenges to the control of TB, including high incidence, sub-optimal treatment adherence, and the prevalence of drug-resistance, with inappropriate treatment (such as high hospital admission rate) and financial burden being important causes.
Supported by the NSFC Young Scientist Fund grant, Dr. Dong, together with Professor Shenglan Tang, Jiang Weixi and Chen Shu from GHRC, will consolidate TB big-data in three provinces using major intuitional routine databases, which could provide useful insights to the current pattern of inpatient service utilization, cost, and financial burden among rural TB patients, and allow systematic evaluation of the determinants. The study will also explore the optimal technical strategy of linking different databases, and the feasibility of using big-data in routine management and policy evaluation.
