Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme

Lead Researcher
Professor Melita Gordon

Salmonella and Enterics

The Salmonella group have worked for 21 years on understanding and preventing 2 serious vaccine-preventable blood-stream infection diseases, both caused by bacteria called Salmonella:

1)      Typhoid fever (caused by Salmonella Typhi), which causes over 3 million cases of serious illness and over 33,000 deaths each year in sub-Saharan Africa. Typhoid predominantly affects healthy school-aged children (5-18y).

2)      Invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella disease, also called ‘iNTS disease’ (caused by Salmonella Typhimurium and Salmonella Enteritidis), which cause 3.4M cases of serious illness and over 680,000 deaths annually. iNTS disease affects children under 18 months, young children with malaria, and adults with HIV.

We work in 4 main areas:

a)      Epidemiology: to understand how much Salmonella disease is happening, how it is transmitted, and what the impact of vaccines could be

b)      Host immunity: how people’s bodies make protective immune responses to Salmonella infection

c)      Bacteria: we study the genes of the bacteria themselves, to understand how they cause disease, and what drugs can be used to treat them.

d)      Vaccines: We are leading clinical trials of existing vaccines, and preparing for clinical trials of new and emerging vaccines for typhoid and iNTS disease

Trainers

Learn more about our training opportunities.