Newsletters

Newsletter September 2015

Dear Global Asthma Network colleagues and friends,

Welcome to the September GAN newsletter. It has been a very busy 2015 so far for us in Auckland and we welcome the inclusion of 32 new centres and 8 new countries since our last newsletter in August 2014.

On a somber note, we are very sad to be saying goodbye to Eamon Ellwood at the end of October, due to insufficient central coordinating funding. We have enjoyed having Eamon as part of the GAN team for the past 7 years and will miss him very much. He has done a splendid job creating and updating the GAN website, creating and updating databases, on-line tools, and analysing surveys.

I am pleased to announce that Professor Neil Pearce (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [LSHTM]) will be the co-ordinator of GAN Phase 1. The Auckland centre will have the title GAN Global Centre with Philippa continuing in her role and communicating with all of you. The Phase 1 data centres will be now located in London (LSHTM) under the guidance of Professor Pearce, and in Murcia Spain (University of Murcia), under the guidance of Professor Luis Garcia-Marcos (for Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries). However the submission of all data and centre reports will be to Philippa who will then forward them on to the appropriate data centre. The GAN Phase 1 Manual for Global Surveillance: Prevalence, Severity, Management and Risk Factors is now completed (updated on 10th September) and is up on the GAN website for you to view, and download if you wish and to begin your fieldwork. The manual is large - over 220 pages, so you may prefer to download the individual chapters that are more relevant to you and your fieldwork.

The GAN website will continue to be updated by Eamon until he leaves and we welcome contributions and suggestions. Please do send any items of interest to Eamon (e.ellwood@auckland.ac.nz) so that he can add these to the website.

We are very heartened at the number of centres and countries that have been interested in the Global Asthma Network (already 301 centres from 126 countries). We are delighted that the tools for the first GAN Surveillance: Prevalence, Severity and Risk Factors study are ready for your use. Philippa has some important points of interest for you on the next page. We wish you well with your study.

With all best wishes from the GAN Global Centre.

Innes
Professor Innes Asher ONZM
Chair of GAN

Global Asthma Network Methodology Notes for Collaborators

It is exciting to now have the fieldwork tools up on the GAN website http://www.globalasthmanetwork.org/ under the “surveillance” tab on the GAN website you will find the tab to access the Manual. I very much look forward to working with you all.

Please note: the new version of the Manual was uploaded on September 10th. If you have a previous version, please replace it with this up to date version as there are some important additions.

The Registration Document is also available on line and ready to go!

Register

When you have completed this, please click on the “submit” button at the end of the document. This will be sent to me and I will then prepare an individual centre report and send this to you so that you can complete this as your fieldwork progresses. You can also download this form, complete and send to me at p.ellwood@auckland.ac.nz

There are some important things to note:

All the points listed below are in the Manual and I urge you and your fieldworkers to read the guidelines so that they are familiar with them.

• The adolescent group (13/14 year olds) is the compulsory group but not all questions are compulsory.
• Not all questions for the children (6/7 year olds, optional age group) and the Adults (parents/guardians of the adolescents and children, optional group) are compulsory.
• The video is only used for the adolescent group
• If the adult group is used, the questionnaires must be linked in some way to the adolescent and children by the coding boxes; or if the questionnaires are scanned, a bar code system could be used. We have suggestions for how this can be done in the manual.
• Any translations of the English language questionnaire must be back translated to English and submitted to the GAN Global Centre (Philippa) for archiving.
• A map of the study area is required. If the GAN collaborating centre was an ISAAC centre, the same geographical sampling frame must be used. Please check with the GAN Global Centre (Philippa) to see if the map that was submitted for ISAAC is suitable for use in GAN and when you register your centre the previous description of your sampling frame will be sent to you with the centre report. If you wish to change this sampling frame please enter into dialogue with Philippa.

All the very best for your fieldwork. It will be a great pleasure to be working with you all. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any assistance.

Kind regards

Philippa (p.ellwood@auckland.ac.nz or info@globalasthmanetwork.org

Global Asthma Network Centres September 2015

106 Countries / Territories that we would like to encourage to participate in GAN. We would be very interested to have a contact for these.

Global Asthma Network Website Report

The Global Asthma Network website is intended to be the main channel for the dissemination of information. It includes information of use to collaborators in the Global Asthma Network, such as upcoming conferences and symposiums, asthma management guidelines and the latest asthma related news.

The website will be continuously updated in the coming year to include tools and information to support our Asthma Surveillance research.

Website Statistics

Website usage has continued to steadily increase as can be seen in the stats below, in spite of seasonal dips in July and January

The management guidelines section has also shown increased usage. This has been driven mainly by the Italian, Columbian, Peruvian and Bosnian guidelines. Guidelines for over 20 different countries are being downloaded each month. Website usage has increased in all regions, with America showing most growth. Africa is growing but slowly.

Global Asthma Report 2011 and 2014

Since the launch of the 2014 update in October 2014, website usage has shown strong growth. After an initial dip the pdf downloads have increased at a steady rate, showing the continued high demand for this valuable document. The 2011 report also still shows steady use.

Social Media

The Global Asthma Network is on Twitter and is gaining more followers regularly. We now have 196 followers. Follow us at @GlobalAsthmaNet. All Global Asthma Network tweets are included as an extension of the news section. News items are tweeted, as well as pertinent Asthma related information.

The Global Asthma Network now has a Wikipedia page. This can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Asthma_Network