Historical and Bioethical Dimensions of Infection Prevention & Control for Drug Resistant TB in Contemporary South Africa

This project is offered as part of the Medical Research Foundation National PhD Training Programme in AMR: https://www.findaphd.com/search/PhDDetails.aspx?CAID=3755

In South Africa, the management of drug-resistant tuberculosis throws many of the tensions around human drivers of drug resistance and the failure of infection prevention control (IPC) systems into sharp relief. A long history of ineffective IPC reflects racially politicised social and economic inequalities that permeate clinic organisation and working cultures. Since the transition to democracy, and re-engineering of primary care, health worker competence and behaviour, and their movement through new clinical spaces, has become a greater focus of assessments of infection control risk and efficacy. At the same time, there are growing calls for a ‘language of ethics’ to be deployed in addressing health worker risks and rights in settings with high TB prevalence. This nexus has been the recent subject of social science, policy studies, and medical ethics investigations, however, the framing of infection control in terms of labour rights and social inequalities is quintessentially historical. The Ph.D. candidate will develop interdisciplinary work that interrogates the historical and bioethical dimensions of dynamic interactions shaping IPC for TB in contemporary South Africa. This project will complement, and inform on-going work to develop ‘whole systems’ interventions to strengthen measures to reduce nosocomial transmission of drug-resistant TB. The successful candidate will be enrolled in the ESRC UCL, Bloomsbury and East London Doctoral Training Programme which will provide additional training opportunities and local student cohort activities.

Apply here: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-funding/funding-scholarships/research-degree-funding

Further application details will be provided via the link.