Infectious Disease

Learning platform teaches clinicians how to spot and treat malaria

Children’s National experts are outlining a novel approach to helping healthcare providers learn how to diagnose and manage malaria; the online tool provides real-time feedback about their decision making.

Children’s National experts are outlining a novel approach to helping healthcare providers learn how to diagnose and manage malaria; the online tool provides real-time feedback about their decision making.

Next-generation medical education looks like this: A white-coat wearing avatar with the voice, face, and know-how of one of the nation’s leading infectious disease experts walks you through the twists and turns of how to diagnose malaria, making stops in a variety of hospital settings. If you make the right diagnostic and treatment decisions, you get instantaneous gold stars. If your choices are off-the-mark, at each decision point you get a clear explanation of why your answer was incorrect.

“This is the future of medical education,” says Barbara Jantausch, M.D., F.A.A.P., F.I.D.S.A., an infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Health System. She’s the female avatar with the John Travolta dance moves and expertise about malaria’s epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment.

Dr. Jantausch will present a poster, “The Hot Zone: An Online Decision-Centered Vignette Player for Teaching Clinical Diagnostic Reasoning Skills,” during IDWeek 2016, the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “It’s case-based, interactive e-learning where you choose your own adventure. The beauty of this module is the training can be self-directed,” Dr. Jantausch adds.

“At Children’s National, we’re pioneering the effort to build discovery-based learning platforms,” says Jeff Sestokas, Director of eLearning. In the vignette player, he’s the male avatar named Dr. Bear. Malaria is the first infectious disease training module but others are planned for the global health series, including Chagas disease and Zika virus, Sestokas says.

Identifying the illness

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), in 2015 an estimated 214 million people around the world had malaria, a mosquito-borne illness, and 438,000 of them died. Because of the lengthy incubation period, many international travelers do not show malaria symptoms until they return to the United States and experience flu-like symptoms including high fevers, shaking chills, and dehydration. Their lab results may include metabolic acidosis, hypoglycemia, normocytic anemia, or thrombocytopenia. At Children’s, 25 percent of children admitted with travel-related malaria are admitted to the intensive care unit.

“This started as a way to offer people in areas that do not see as many patients with malaria an opportunity to learn the same critical thinking skills,” she adds.

People who click through the vignettes play the role of a clinician working in the emergency department whose patients include a 10-year-old girl who has just returned from vacation two weeks prior. The exhausted girl lies on a bed amid weeping parents and grandparents. She suffers from a headache and muscle pain and has a 39.8 C fever, though it spiked higher before her arrival at the ED.

“Because symptoms for malaria can mimic other infectious diseases, clinicians need to be able to recognize it in order to ask the most appropriate questions,” she says.

Making real-time decisions

In the vignette, participants are asked to type additional questions to help with diagnosis. Then, they select one of three geographic regions to explore in the 20-minute module in order to gain a better appreciation of the epidemiology of malaria, including the Plasmodium species that cause disease in those regions; to recognize a patient with symptoms of malaria; and to manage their care in keeping with the CDC’s guidance.

Within a few clicks, participants select the degree of the girl’s parasitemia, view slides from thick and thin blood smears, choose the medicine best suited for the parasite causing illness and geographic region the family visited, and decide on follow-up care.

“The timed sections force decision-making in real-world situations,” Sestokas adds. “Behind the scenes, we can look at how well clinicians recognize the subtleties prior to making their decisions and we provide feedback in real-time. Ultimately, our goal is to stimulate deliberate, reflective practices.”

Rheumatic heart disease is a family affair

Parasternal long axis echocardiographic still frames in early systole in black and white and color Doppler of RHD-positive index case, sibling, and mother.

Parasternal long axis echocardiographic still frames in early systole in black and white and color Doppler of RHD-positive index case, sibling, and mother.

Siblings of children in Northern Uganda with latent rheumatic heart disease (RHD) are more likely to have the disease and would benefit from targeted echocardiographic screening to detect RHD before it causes permanent damage to their heart valves, according to an unprecedented family screening study.

RHD results from a cascade of health conditions that begin with untreated group A β-hemolytic streptococcal infection. In 3 percent to 6 percent of cases, repeat strep throat can lead to acute rheumatic fever. Almost half of children who experience acute rheumatic fever later develop chronic scarring of the heart valves, RHD.  RHD affects around 33 million people and occurs most commonly in low-resource environments, thriving in conditions of poverty, poor sanitation, and limited primary healthcare. Treating streptococcal infections can prevent a large percentage of children from developing RHD, but these infections are difficult to diagnose in low-resource settings.

Right now, kids with RHD often are not identified until they reach adolescence, when the damage to their heart valves is advanced and severe cardiac symptoms or complications develop. In such countries, cardiac specialists are rare, and intervention at an advanced stage is typically too expensive or unavailable.  Echocardiographic screening can “see” RHD before symptoms develop and allow for earlier, more affordable, and more practical intervention. A team led by Children’s National Health System clinicians and researchers conducted the first-ever family echocardiographic screening study over three months to help identify optimal strategies to pinpoint the families in Northern Uganda at highest RHD risk.

“Echocardiographic screening has the potential to be a powerful public health strategy to lower the burden of RHD around the world,” says Andrea Beaton, M.D., a cardiologist at Children’s National and the study’s senior author. “Finding the 1 percent of vulnerable children who live in regions where RHD is endemic is a challenge. But detecting these silent illnesses would open the possibility of providing these children monthly penicillin shots – which cost pennies and prevent recurrent streptococcal infections, rheumatic fever, and further valve damage.”

The research team leveraged existing school-based screening data in Northern Uganda’s Gulu District and recruited 60 RHD-positive children and matched them with 67 kids attending the same schools who were similar in age and gender but did not have RHD. After screening more than 1,000 parents, guardians, and first-degree family members, they found that children with RHD were 4.5 times as likely to have a sibling who definitely had RHD.

“Definite RHD was more likely to be found in mothers, with 9.3 percent (10/107 screened) having echocardiographic evidence of definite RHD, compared to fathers 0 percent (0/48 screened, p = 0.03), and siblings 3.3 percent (10/300 screened, p = 0.02),” writes lead author Twalib Aliku, School of Medicine, Gulu University, and colleagues. “There was no increased familial, or sibling risk of RHD in the first-degree relatives of RHD-positive cases (borderline & definite RHD) versus RHD-negative cases. However, RHD-positive cases had a 4.5 times greater chance of having a sibling with definite RHD (p = 0.05) and this risk increased to 5.6 times greater chance if you limited the comparison to RHD-positive cases with definite RHD (n = 30, p = 0.03.”

The paper, “Targeted Echocardiographic Screening for Latent Rheumatic Heart Disease in Northern Uganda,” was published recently by PLoS and is among a dozen papers published this year about the group’s work in Africa, done under the aegis of the Children’s Research Institute global health initiative.

The World Health Organization previously has prioritized screening household contacts when an index case of tuberculosis (TB) is identified, the authors note. Like TB, RHD has a strong environmental component in that family members are exposed to the same poverty, overcrowding, and circulating streptococcal strains. In a country where the median age is 15.5, it is not practical to screen youths without a detailed plan, Dr. Beaton says. Additional work would need to be done to determine which tasks to shift to nurses, who are more plentiful, and how to best leverage portable, hand-held screening machines.

“Optimal implementation strategies, the who, when, in what setting, and how often to screen, have received little study to date, yet these details are critical to developing cost-effective and sustainable screening programs,” Aliku and co-authors write. “Our study suggests that siblings of children identified with latent RHD are a high-risk group, and should be prioritized for screening.”

Related resources:  Research at a Glance

Targeted echocardiographic screening for latent RHD in Northern Uganda

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What’s Known
Echocardiograms use the echoes of sound waves to create “movies” of the beating heart, its valves, and other structures. While rheumatic heart disease (RHD) was prevalent in the United States as late as the 1900s, improved housing conditions and the availability of powerful medicines like antibiotics and penicillin have lowered its incidence to 0.04 to 0.06 cases per 1,000 U.S. children. In regions where streptococcal infections flourish, RHD remains a scourge. Using echocardiographic screening to identify latent RHD— which is apparent on echocardiography before the child has symptoms that can be spotted by clinicians—has the potential to reduce the disease’s global burden.

What’s New
Optimal implementation must account for whom to target, when, in which settings, and how often to screen. The team led by Children’s National Health System researchers and clinicians conducted the first family screening study in Northern Uganda to assess the utility of echocardiographic screening of first-degree relatives of children with latent RHD. They used existing school-based screening data to identify potential participants and invited all first-degree relatives older than 5 years for echocardiography screening. The study recruited 60 RHD-positive schoolchildren and matched them with 67 RHD-negative kids of similar age and gender. Some 1,122 family members were then screened. Children with any RHD were 4.5 times as likely to have a sibling with definite RHD, a risk that increased to 5.6 times if researchers looked solely at index cases with definite RHD. The team, led by Andrea Beaton, MD, a cardiologist at Children’s National, also found that mothers had a 9.3 percent rate of latent RHD—a high rate that was independent of whether their child was RHD-positive.

Questions for Future Research
Q: Many children living in RHD-endemic areas, exposed to the same environmental conditions as RHD-positive kids, are able to fend off disease. Are protective genes to credit for their resilience?
Q: What are the best approaches to train nurses and community workers in how to use lower-cost, handheld echocardiograms to facilitate large-scale screening in countries where healthcare resources are constrained?

Source:  “Targeted Echocardiographic Screening for Latent Rheumatic Heart Disease in Northern Uganda: Evaluating Familial Risk Following Identification of an Index Case.” T. Aliku, C. Sable, A. Scheel, A. Tompsett, P. Lwabi, E. Okello, R. McCarter, M. Summar, and A. Beaton. Published online by PLoS June 13, 2016.

Congenital Zika Viral Infection Linked to Significant Fetal Brain Abnormalities

mosquito

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What’s Known
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Zika viral transmission is occurring extensively throughout Central and South America. Like other mosquito-borne viruses, Zika virus can be passed by pregnant women to developing fetuses. Unlike these other viruses, Zika has been implicated in a growing number of cases of Brazilian infants born with microcephaly, a condition characterized by undersized heads and severe brain damage. The precise strategy that the Zika virus uses to elude the immune system and the reason why fetal brain cells are particularly vulnerable remain unknown.

What’s New
A 33-year-old Finnish woman was 11 weeks pregnant when she and her husband traveled on vacation to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize in late November 2015. The pair was bitten by mosquitoes during their trip, particularly in Guatemala. One day after returning to their Washington, DC home, the woman got sick, experiencing eye pain, muscle pain, a mild fever, and a rash. A series of early ultrasounds showed no sign of microcephaly or brain calcifications. A fetal ultrasound at the 19th week and a fetal MRI at the 20th week, however, revealed severe brain damage.

The brain of the 21-week-old aborted fetus weighed only 30 grams. Zika RNA, viral particles, and infectious virus were detected, and Zika virus isolated from the fetal brain remained infectious when tested. The concentration of virus was highest in the fetal brain, umbilical cord, and placenta. The mother remained infected with Zika virus at 21 weeks, some 10 weeks after her initial infection.

Questions for Future Research

  • Could serial measurements and blood tests more accurately detect and, ultimately, predict fetal abnormalities following Zika virus infection?
  • Why does the Zika virus replicate with ease within the womb?
  • At which stage of pregnancy are fetuses most vulnerable?
  • Which specific brain cells does Zika target?

Source: “Zika Virus Infection with Prolonged Maternal Viremia and Fetal Brain Abnormalities.” R.W. Driggers, C.Y. Ho, E.M. Korhonen, S. Kuivanen, A.J. Jääskeläinen, T. Smura, D.A. Hill, R. DeBiasi, G. Vezina, J. Timofeev, F.J. Rodriguez, L. Levanov, J. Razak, P. Iyengar, A. Hennenfent, R. Kennedy, R. Lanciotti, A. du Plessis, and O. Vapalahti. The New England Journal of Medicine. June 2, 2016.
Drs. DeBiasi and du Plessis

Suspected domestic zika virus infection in Florida underscores the importance of ongoing vigilance

Drs. DeBiasi and du Plessis

Federal health officials continue to investigate the first possible cases of domestic Zika virus transmission in Florida. In light of the growing number of Zika infections, the vast majority of which have been associated with foreign travel, vigilance for additional cases is warranted – particularly as summer heat intensifies and mosquito populations grow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now advises that all pregnant women in the continental United States and U.S. territories be evaluated for Zika infection at each prenatal care visit. The CDC also recognizes that Zika-exposed infants will require long-term, multidisciplinary care.

In mid-May, Children’s National Health System Fetal Medicine Institute and Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease announced the formation of a Congenital Zika Virus Program to serve as a dedicated resource for referring clinicians and for pregnant women to receive counseling and science-driven answers about the impact of the Zika virus on pregnancies and newborns. Children’s clinicians have consulted on 30 pregnancies or births with potential Zika virus exposure and/or infection. As of Aug. 31, eight were Zika-positive or probable. One of the pregnancies was the subject of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine.

”While we’re hopeful there are few local cases, the Congenital Zika Virus Program has been developing emergency response plans in collaboration with local departments of health to prepare for any eventuality,” says Roberta DeBiasi, MD, MS, Chief of the Division of Infectious Disease and Congenital Zika Virus Program co-leader.

Over the years, Children’s National has invested in equipment and highly trained personnel, building world-class expertise in infectious diseases, pediatric neurology, pediatric cardiology, genetics, neurodevelopment, and other specialties. Children’s clinicians are recognized leaders in next-generation imaging techniques, such as fetal MRI, which detects more subtle and earlier indications of impaired brain growth. A variety of divisions work together to offer multidisciplinary support and coordinated care to infants born with special needs. As the nation braces for the possible expansion of Zika virus infection to other states, Children’s National is facilitating the multi-step process of testing blood, urine, and tissue with state health departments, helping to ensure timely and precise information. Children’s National specialists guide Zika-affected pregnancies through the fetal period and are able to oversee and coordinate the care of Zika-affected infants after delivery. Care and clinical support is provided by a multidisciplinary team of pediatric neurologists, ophthalmologists, audiologists, physical and occupational therapists, infectious disease experts, and neurodevelopmental physicians.

The Children’s National multidisciplinary team includes:

  • Adre du Plessis, M.B.Ch.B., Director of the Fetal Medicine Institute, Chief of the Fetal and Transitional Medicine Division, and Congenital Zika Virus Program co-leader;
  • Roberta DeBiasi, M.D., M.S., Chief of the Division of Infectious Disease and Congenital Zika Virus Program co-leader;
  • Cara Biddle, M.D., M.P.H., Medical Director, Children’s Health Center, and a bilingual expert on complex care;
  • Dorothy Bulas, M.D., Radiologist in the Division of Diagnostic Imaging and Radiology;
  • Taeun Chang, M.D., Director, Neonatal Neurology Program in the Division of Neurophysiology, Epilepsy and Critical Care Neurology;
  • Sarah Mulkey, M.D., Ph.D., Fetal-Neonatal Neurologist, Fetal Medicine Institute;
  • Lindsay Pesacreta, M.S., F.N.P.-B.C., Board-Certified Family Nurse Practitioner; and
  • Gilbert Vezina, M.D., attending Radiologist in the Division of Diagnostic Imaging and Radiology and Director of the Neuroradiology Program.

[Updated Sept. 13, 2016]

New program provides science-driven answers about zika virus’s impact on pregnancies

Drs. DeBiasi and du Plessis

Each week, as temperatures rise, the likelihood increases that the United States will experience domestic Zika virus transmission. Indeed, such domestic Zika transmission already is occurring in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Children’s National Health System Fetal Medicine Institute and Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease announced the formation of a Congenital Zika Virus Program to serve as a dedicated resource for referring clinicians and for pregnant women to receive counseling and science-driven answers about the impact of the Zika virus on their pregnancies.

Over years, Children’s National has invested in equipment and highly trained personnel, building expertise in infectious diseases, pediatric neurology, pediatric cardiology, genetics, neurodevelopment, and other specialties. Children’s clinicians are recognized as national leaders in next-generation imaging techniques, such as fetal MRI, and a variety of divisions work together to offer multidisciplinary support and coordinated care to infants born with special needs. As the nation prepares for the Zika virus, Children’s National is facilitating the multi-step process of blood testing, helping to ensure timely and precise information. Children’s National specialists are able to guide Zika-affected pregnancies through the fetal period and can oversee the care of Zika-affected infants after delivery. Care and clinical support is provided by a multidisciplinary team of pediatric neurologists, physical therapists, infectious disease experts, and neurodevelopmental physicians.