Epidemiology and Population Health Unit

The mission of this unit is the exploration and understanding of the social ecology of disease causation with the overarching goal of control and prevention. Staff of the unit conduct periodic community-based disease assessment and surveillance within the Tamburawa community in the Dawakin Kudu local government area (population = 370,900) where the Centre is physically located.

The Unit collaborates closely with local government authorities, the Kano CDC (Centre for Disease Control), the Kano State Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme, and the Kano State Ministry of Health with respect to TB and MDR-TB surveillance.

The unit also partners with federal agencies (e.g., NACA: National Agency for the Control of AIDS and the National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme) to perform programmatic and individual-level assessments. Researchers at KIRCT recently collaborated with NACA and conducted the world’s largest HIV/AIDS survey in Nigeria, and they were also responsible for establishing quality matrix for the validation of the BIG database that was constructed for the survey (Salihu HM, Yusuf Z, Dongarwar D, Aliyu SH, Yusuf RA, Aliyu MH, Aliyu G. Development of a Quality Assurance Score for the Nigeria AIDS Indicator and Impact Survey (NAIIS) Database: Validation Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research (Formative Research). 2022 Jan 28;6(1):e25752. doi: 10.2196/25752.PMID: 35089143).

The Unit currently has an ongoing grant to train NACA staff in data system management and analytics of “BIG DATA”. Epidemiologists from the Centre have played a critical role during the Covid-19 pandemic with their huge international contributions that include:

1) The establishment of an international and secure informatics infrastructure to investigate COVID-19 in collaboration with data scientists from the US, Canada, Singapore, China, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Australia (the SCOR Consortium);

2) One of our senior scholars (Professor Habib AG) was the Nigeria PI for Covid-19 therapeutic trials in Africa organized by the World Health Organization;

3) The PEI (Pandemic Efficiency Index) for global ranking of COVID-19-related mortality was invented by and credited to our scientist (Professor Salihu HM).