Phages for Global Health is pleased to announce the call for applications for the first West Africa Phage Workshop! This hands-on laboratory training workshop will be held during July 7 - 20, 2019, in Ghana at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

Last month we delivered our first Phage Workshop in West Africa, with participants from 6 countries gathering in Ghana for the 2-week laboratory training. Now that they have returned to their countries, several of the participants have already initiated plans to teach phage biology through their home institutions and to begin phage research projects.

We’ve run our previous phage workshops in Africa because that continent is forecasted to experience the highest per capita death rate from antibiotic resistant infections. But developing countries in Asia will also be ravaged by antibiotic resistance, with an estimated 4.7 million deaths expected there each year.

Mr. Deus Kamya was a recent graduate from Makerere University in Uganda when he attended our very first Phage Workshop in 2017. Now he has won 3 small grants to support his master's thesis research on phages.

We have been very fortunate to have fantastic phage experts who have developed our Phage Workshop curriculum and delivered our 3 previous workshops in East & West Africa. They include Prof. Martha Clokie and Dr. Janet Nale from the University of Leicester (UK) and Dr. Ben Chan from Yale University (US).

Dr. Lawan Kabiru participated in our Phage Workshop in Ghana this past July, which was our 1st Workshop in West Africa. Now he is back home in Nigeria teaching a team of scientists how to isolate phages to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria that commonly contaminate food, such as Salmonella and E. coli.