Impact
The CHAMPS platform—experience, infrastructure, and relationships—enables CHAMPS teams to support additional scientific work and respond to emerging health needs. Collectively, the CHAMPS network builds capacity by mentoring scientists, providing feedback to health personnel, and empowering communities to ensure sustainable health improvements.
CHAMPS provides open access, summarized and de-identified data in real time and upon request. We also share data sets and specimens for independent research.
Pivoting to Pandemic Response
In 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 spread across the globe, CHAMPS teams quickly turned their attention and resources to pandemic response. This pivot demonstrated the capacity of our global network to adapt and respond to large-scale public health emergencies.
- CHAMPS pathologists and microbiologists offered technical support, operated COVID-19 testing laboratories, trained staff and shared testing equipment with local health facilities and hospitals.
- CHAMPS Social Behavioral Science and Community Engagement teams worked with district health officials to conduct community health education on COVID-19 prevention, infection control and treatment options.
- By utilizing health and demographic surveillance data from CHAMPS catchment areas, CHAMPS demographers worked with the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa to better understand the global burden of COVID-19 deaths.
Improving Global Health Metrics
Public health officials in many high-mortality areas use verbal autopsy—a series of questions an investigator asks a family—to try to understand why deaths occur. CHAMPS teams in Mozambique and Sierra Leone worked with the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Toronto on Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA), a program that tracks births, deaths, and causes of death in representative communities using verbal autopsies. Researchers compared the verbal autopsy results to CHAMPS’ accurate findings to refine the cause of death information for the COMSA program.