CHAMPS Bangladesh
About Our Work
In Bangladesh, CHAMPS operates in the Baliakandi sub-district, a region with a high child mortality rate of 50 per 1,000. Despite over 30 healthcare facilities, including health centers and private clinics, challenges persist in saving children’s lives. The Baliakandi Upazila Health Complex (BUHC), the main referral hospital, offers critical services such as maternal and child health, reproductive health, nutritional activity services and mental health, making it a key site for CHAMPS’ facility-based data-driven initiatives. Additionally, CHAMPS works with facilities like Faridpur Medical College Hospital (FMCH) and Zahid Memorial Children Hospital (ZMCH). In collaboration with implementation partners like the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU), and the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), CHAMPS aims to foster a hopeful future, improving child health outcomes through shared knowledge and innovative data-to-action.
Our Impact
In Bangladesh, CHAMPS positively impacts over 216,000 lives in the Baliakandi sub-district. By collaborating with partners to address high child mortality rates through data-driven strategies and innovative community interventions, we are saving children’s lives in the region.
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Population Under Surveillance
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Under 5 Mortality Rate
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Infant Mortality Rate
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Neonatal Mortality Rate
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Stillbirth Rate
Data updated: 2021
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Meet our Directors
Shams El Arifeen is the first Senior Director of the Maternal and Child Health Division (MCHD) at icddr,b in Bangladesh. Dr. Arifeen is also a Professor at the James P. Grant School of Public Health at the BRAC University in Bangladesh, where he teaches epidemiology. His interests are in maternal, newborn and child health, nutrition and development, where he has worked for over 30 years. His work has focused on monitoring and evaluation of community and facility-based interventions addressing common causes of maternal and child illness and death, as well as implementation research to improve delivery of health services. He actively participates in national efforts within Bangladesh to scale up evidence-based interventions. Dr. Arifeen serves on a number of Bangladesh’s technical and advisory committees as well as on global task/working groups.
He is trained in medicine, public health, nutrition, and epidemiology, and holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from Dhaka Medical College and a Master of Public Health and Doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. He has published over 260 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Emily Gurley is an Associate Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has worked in public health research in Bangladesh since 2003, and she spent 12 years at the icddr,b (International Center for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh) where she led the Surveillance and Outbreak Investigation Unit, and served as Director of the Program on Emerging Infections. She worked closely with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Government of Bangladesh to establish national surveillance for meningoencephalitis, respiratory infections, acute gastroenteritis, acute hepatitis, and hospital-acquired infections, with a focus on developing junior scientists. Dr. Gurley earned her Master of Public Health from Emory University in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University in 2012.
Dr. Gurley leads multidisciplinary studies on the transmission, burden, and epidemiology of a variety of emerging and vaccine-preventable diseases, taking into account the ecological context in which human disease occurs. Her interests include improving the communication and collaboration between field epidemiologists and infectious disease modelers, and the development of novel surveillance and outbreak detection strategies. She began research to develop strategies for the use of post-mortem tissue sampling as a surveillance tool in Bangladesh in 2008.
Dr. Gurley has published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers and has served on World Health Organization (WHO) committees to draft recommendations about the use of Hepatitis E vaccines and measurement of dengue infection. She currently serves on WHO’s taskforce for research and development of medical countermeasures against Nipah virus.
Key Partners
CHAMPS Working in Bangladesh to Save Lives
Discover the stories of hope and change as CHAMPS works tirelessly saving children’s lives in Bangladesh.
Site Stories
Publication
Alam, M., Islam, M. S., Jahan, M. I., Deb, A. S., Rahman, A., Islam, Z., Chowdhury, A. I., Islam, K. M., Hossain, M. Z., Ahmed, D., Arifeen, S. E., Gurley, E. S., & Rahman, M. (2025). A novel virulent core genome multilocus sequence type CT 11424 of Listeria monocytogenes isolate causing stillbirth in Bangladesh. BMC Microbiology, 25, Article 61. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12866-024-03650-5
Background Listeria monocytogenes is a foodborne pathogen that can lead to severe pregnancy outcomes. This study reports the clinical and genomic characteristics of a Listeria-mediated stillbirth identified…
June 21, 2024
Case Study: Addressing Neonatal Nosocomial Infections in a Bangladeshi Hospital Facility
Publication
Lee, K. H., Chowdhury, A. I., Rahman, Q. S., Cunningham, S. A., Parveen, S., Bari, S., El Arifeen, S., & Gurley, E. S. (2023). Child marriage in rural Bangladesh and impact on obstetric complications and perinatal death: Findings from a health and demographic surveillance system. PLOS ONE, 18(7), e0288746. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288746
Adolescent pregnancies, a risk factor for obstetric complications and perinatal mortality, are driven by child marriage in many regions of South Asia. We used data…
Publication
Alam, M., Jahan, M. I., Jahan, S., Blau, D. M., Rahman, A., Rahman, M. Z., Hossain, M. Z., Gurley, E. S., El Arifeen, S., & Rahman, M. (2021). Coding-complete sequence of a SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.25 lineage obtained from an 8-day-old deceased neonate. Microbiology Resource Announcements, 10(35). https://doi.org/10.1128/mra.00756-21
We report the complete genome sequence of a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) strain, hCoV-19/Bangladesh/icddrb-CHAMPS-BDAA02205/2021, obtained from a nasopharyngeal swab from a deceased…
Publication
Lee, K. H., Chowdhury, A. I., Rahman, Q. S.-u., Cunningham, S. A., Parveen, S., Bari, S., El Arifeen, S., & Gurley, E. S. (2023). Child marriage in rural Bangladesh and impact on obstetric complications and perinatal death: Findings from a health and demographic surveillance system. PLOS ONE, 18(7), e0288746. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288746
Adolescent pregnancies, a risk factor for obstetric complications and perinatal mortality, are driven by child marriage in many regions of South Asia. We used data…
Publication