A clinician, researcher and staunch advocate for women's health, Prof. Beverley Lawton, founder and director of the National Centre for Women's Health Research at the Victoria University of Wellington, has worked over the past 20 years to ensure that her team's work is translated into clinical practice, particularly in the areas of cervical cancer prevention and maternal health outcomes for Maori women, said an HRC statement.
Research published by the National Centre for Women's Health Research showed that enabling women to self-test for human papillomavirus (HPV) rather than undergo a traditional cervical smear could significantly reduce the number of under-screened or never-screened Maori women, resulting in a decrease in deaths from cervical cancer in New Zealand.
The team's trials showed there were multiple benefits to self-testing for HPV, including that it was less invasive and easy for women to do themselves and highly acceptable for women compared to a smear.
HRC chief executive Sunny Collings praised their commitment to "engaging with communities to help build trust and facilitate the dissemination of important information about women's health."
"You must treasure your community champions who are so vital to successfully translating research into real-world settings," Lawton said.
Epidemiologist Michael Baker from the University of Otago, Wellington, and his team have been awarded a breakthrough in understanding the causes of acute rheumatic fever and the role of group A streptococcal infections.
Their studies, published in the Lancet, found the strongest evidence yet that household overcrowding and poor access to primary healthcare are major modifiable risk factors for acute rheumatic fever and streptococcal infections of the skin.
"We think children in crowded conditions are getting repeated skin infections with strep. This repeated exposure may be priming their immune systems to become sensitized to strep so that when they encounter it again, they develop a pathological immune response that results in rheumatic fever or rheumatic heart disease," Baker said.
The team's results suggest that treating skin infections in young children could prevent them from developing rheumatic fever, providing an effective intervention in the short term while promising long-term interventions like vaccines for strep are still being developed.
Currently, rheumatic fever still persists in communities living in deprivation in New Zealand and Australia, said Collings, adding that there is an urgent need to stamp out rheumatic fever as a global health problem.
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