Ben Cooper

Epidemiologist Epidemiologist for modelling AMR transmission in LMICMore than 500 staff members at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) contribute e...

Open position for an ID modeler @itmantwerp.bsky.social on community-level + healthcare transmission of resistant #AMR bacteria in LRS, working with Clinical Research Unit Nanoro, @esthervk.bsky.social, @bugwonk.bsky.social, KEMRI-wellcome Kilifi, myself,... #IDSky #EpiSky
www.itg.be/en/jobs-and-...

Screenshot from viva for DPhil candidate Sai Thein Than Tun with examiners Ben Cooper and Jennifer Flegg. All are smiling as Sai has just passed his viva with minor corrections and the examiners were hugely impressed at the quality of the work .

Congratulations to Sai Thein Than Tun @tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk ‬for passing his PhD viva & overcoming some formidable obstacles in the process. Sai’s work on malaria elimination is a great example of simple models supporting clear thinking about complex processes
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Cost-effectiveness of maintaining an active hospital microbiology laboratory service in Timor-Leste Maintaining an active hospital microbiology laboratory allows definitive antibiotic treatment for bacterial infections to be given in a timely manner.…

Many hospitals in LMICs lack access to microbiology services. @cherrylim128.bsky.social et al asked if such services are a good use of limited resources. The answer: emphatically yes. Such services are likely to improve patient outcomes & reduce overall costs. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A final feeling. While walking by the Thames in Abingdon last Sunday evening Joe heard drums in the distance & led me to this fallen dismembered tree, the site of an amazing one performer free festival and, despite all the amputations, a moment of pure contemplation & sensory delight.

Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris review – with a little help from John, Paul, George and Ringo The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom

@laylamoran.bsky.social as our local MP & chair of the HSCC it would be great if you could help promote Joe’s fundraising for this brilliant local charity, highlight the lack of out of school support for some of those who need it most & read John’s brilliant book www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Joe has been attending Yellow Submarine 1 day/wk in holidays since 2019. He loves it, but last December Oxfordshire County Council told us they would no longer support YS to work with children needing 1-1 support, so kids like Joe who need to be active and outside currently have nowhere to go.

board full of text explaining all the amazing things Oxfordshire charity Yellow Submarine does to support young people and adults with learning disabilities and autism to lead full lives

but since Joe doesn’t believe in lying back & saying how bad his luck is he’ll be running his first 10k in July to support amazing local charity, Yellow Submarine www.yellowsubmarine.org.uk. Please sponsor him if you can bit.ly/3G24aF9 repost if you can’t & visit their awesome Oxford cafe.

YouTube video by Yo-Yo Ma - Topic Hard Times Come Again No More

he’s been listening on his headphones to Hard Times Come Again No More from Yo-Yo Ma’s Appalachian Journey www.youtube.com/watch?v=by3d.... The hardest part of all is how little support kids like Joe get: no breakfast clubs, no music lessons, and now no holiday clubs …

I particularly welcomed the book’s pushback against Daniel Levitin’s claims about which DSM categories do/don’t respond emotionally to music. Joe, who has an ASD diagnosis should he care to use it, often suddenly bursts into tears and tells me “I feel sad”. Every single time it has the same cause:

…from using Eddy Grant’s Police on My Back (Sandinista! version obvs) as a teaching aid, to amazement at the intensity of Joe’s musical engagement and the exuberance of his musical creativity, to the great leaps forward enabled by modern ABA.

What an incredible piece of music. Joe was transported. I was also transported by John’s book, a paean to the power of music to shape our lives and bring us together across neurological divides. It is deeply moving, particularly so for me because of the congruences with our family’s experiences…

Joe running in a parkrun event in a field next to the Thames in Abingdon

Joe lost in music while listening to Kraftwerk's Autobahn and drumming on a small Kenyan drum. In the background is John Harris's book Maybe I'm amazed next to lava lamp

Kudos to 16yo son, Joe, who has a learning disability due to #ADNP syndrome, for completing his 50th #parkrun last week in Abingdon. Inspired by @johnharris1969.bsky.social ’s new book Maybe I'm Amazed www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/serie... Joe’s post-run chill-out was spent drumming to Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

Track news reports of #SubstandardMedicines and #FalsifiedMedicine in your country. View our Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe, which filters by key words, time-periods, locations, and language. #medswecantrust
@tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk @wellcometrust.bsky.social @moru-mip.bsky.social

Joe, a 16 year old neurodivergent boy, deeply lost in music, plays a drum set assembled from from roughly cut lumber in front of a tree covered with ivy in a style that combines the instinctual energy of Moe Tucker, legendary drummer from the Velvet Underground, with the distinctive hi-hat style of Topper Headon, legendary drummer from The Clash.

This is Joe at a glampsite in Hay-on-Wye last summer. My cousin, an in-demand bohemian luthier and (naturally) resting actor who lives in Frome (www.linkedin.com/in/laurence-...) calls him a lumber drummer 🤩

YouTube video by UkuleleOrchestra Smells Like Teen Spirit - The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

As a recovering Velvets & Clash obsessive, Hay & Frome fanboy, dad to a neurodivergent 16yo musicophile & having been through the whole dehumanising ASD diagnosis thing (🤮) this resonates on SO many levels. For Joe, since he was about 5 yrs old, this has been THE song www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z680...

Rachel Otuko (@missotuko.bsky.social), on the left of the picture, an Oxford DPhil student and teacher on the workshop explains a graph plotted on the laptop screen to a student from the Africa CDC attending the workshop. The room is filled with other students who are deep in thought while staring at computer screens which are running the same R Shiny Application.

Thanks to Oraya Srimokla & cherrylim128.bsky.social for making the pictured Shiny App at such short notice (based on this paper www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...). Also to other Oxford faculty Gisela Robles Aguilar and @missotuko.bsky.social & to IHME colleagues who we shared the teaching with.

students on short course point at laptop screens which is running an R Shiny web application about cost-effectiveness of maintaining a microbiological diagnostic lab which is based on this paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.14.24307355v1

Just back from teaching on a 4 day policy-focused AMR workshop in Nairobi hosted by the brilliant cema-africa.uonbi.ac.ke (with generous funding from @wellcometrust.bsky.social). Great to meet so many inspiring people from throughout Africa working to reduce the number of lives lost to #AMR.

Mo Yin

#ResearchHighlight from Mo Yin @moru-mip.bsky.social

Cost-effectiveness of a short-course #antibiotic treatment strategy for the treatment of ventilator-associated #pneumonia: an economic analysis of the #REGARDVAP trial

Read more 👉 www.ndm.ac/tropmed.res-hi
👉 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Are you researching #InfectiousDiseases #EmergingInfections #malaria or #NTDs? The datasets we host harmonise tens of thousands of individual patient data, enabling researchers to answer new questions from existing data. Learn more www.iddo.org/data-sh... #BeatNTDs

Love it! I wish more schools would get this. My 16yo son, Joe, who has HVDAS, ASD etc, also fears hand dryers but is transported by nature & music to an extent I didn’t even see in my dad who devoted half his life to the guitar www.theguardian.com/theguardian/... We need to get out to the mountains.

Blackadder definitely a good start
Cunk on Britain on the iplayer (my 11 year old’s favourite) is hard to beat www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...)
David Olusoga (my wife’s favourite when she was cramming for her test last year) is also consistently great www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Systematic review of antibiotic durations in @jac-amr.bsky.social

n=315 RCTs

85% demonstrated equivalence or non-inferiority of shorter therapy

Only 7% in ICU, 14% in LMIC, and 15% low risk of bias

academic.oup.com/jacamr/artic...

Agree with Tom. I'm getting on pretty well with one of these www.brooksengland.com/en_uk/c15-ca...

Christmas tree being carried on the basket of a green Elephant Bike (a reconditioned posties bike)

I know this is pedantic, but surely that's #TreeByTrike
This is #TreeByBike :

Hoorah! Congratulations again!

🚨 New preprint!! How can antibiotic-resistant bacteria increase in abundance in the human gut microbiome, even without antibiotics? 🧐 We show that strain-specific ecological interactions are key to understanding resistance dynamics in microbial communities. 🧵👇 1/5
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Amazing!

Seven is the new fourteen - Let's talk science with Marc Bonten Some think of medicine, or at least antibiotic treatment duration, as a religion. In the Bible “seven” stands for completeness (I got that from Wikipedia), and therefore infections should be treated w...

Seven is the new fourteen..... for days of antibiotic treatment of bloodstream infections?

Read my new post, inspired by the BALANCE study published in NEJM 👇

letstalkscience.eu/2024/11/26/s...

#MeetOurResearchers interview with Proochista Ariana @ndmoxford.bsky.social

Building capacity for #GlobalHealth impact

Our MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine fosters effective solutions & global health leadership

Watch the video 👉 www.tropicalmedicine.ox.ac.uk/wall-of-face...

Difference-in-Difference in the Time of Cholera: a Gentle Introduction for Epidemiologists The goal of this article is to provide an introduction to the intuition behind the difference-in-difference method for epidemiologists. We focus on the theoretical aspects of this tool, including the ...

...though John Snow's work on cholera in south London was his more important contribution to causality in public health.
Great article from Ellen Caniglia and @epiellie.bsky.social here pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...