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STS at Chatham House with PANDORA-ID

25 October 2018

As part of her work with the PANDORA-ID consortium, Prof. Sarah Edwards, and third year student Dylan Kawende, recently attended a meeting to formalise a partnership with the new African CDC.

Prof. Sarah Edwards with various luminaries at Chatham House
PANDORA-ID NET is European funded consortium to support research during outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases across Africa. Prof. Sarah Edwards is the Ethics and Social Science lead, working closely with colleagues at UCL and Chatham House, as well as across Africa.

This week, a meeting was held at Chatham House, hosted by Prof. Sir David Heymann (LSHTM) to formalise a partnership with the newly formed African CDC (Centre for Disease Control), which has a legal mandate from the African Union. As part of their work, Chatham House is preparing a small cohort of future African leaders with a dedicated one year fellowship. Dr Raji Tajudeen from the African CDC is one of those fellows for 2018-19 (pictured below), whose project is being supervised by Prof. Edwards.

(l-r) Dr Tajudeen, Prof. Edwards, Dylan Kawende at Chatham House

To feed into this work, third year student Dylan Kawende (pictured with Dr Tajudeen and Prof. Edwards) is undertaking a project with an analysis of the concept of 'equipoise', or scientific uncertainty, used to help justify clinical trials - a concept used in the US Academy of Science Report on the West African Ebola outbreak. The long term objective is to support the African Union in establishing their own ethics framework and regulatory system for evaluating and licensing new medicines.