Dear CHIFA colleagues,
This morning I opened a discussion here on CHIFA on how organisations can better coordinate to meet the information needs of policymakers. This was in relation to a new toolbkit from the US-based NGO 'Results for Development', on the topic of early childhood development.
The questions I raised could equally be applied to Group B Strep disease (or indeed any health topic).
The World Health Organization issued a GBS guideline in 2024:
'According to the WHO 2024 guideline, pregnant women should be offered universal antenatal screening for Group B Streptococcus around 35–37 weeks’ gestation. WHO also recommends a risk-based alternative in settings where universal screening is not feasible. Those who test positive should receive intravenous antibiotics, such as penicillin or ampicillin, at least four hours before delivery to prevent passing GBS to their baby. This approach reduces the risk of newborn early-onset disease risk by about 80%.'
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/group-b-streptococcus-(gbs)
The guideline is available here: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240099128
However, as we have seen in the first 2 days of our Spotlight on GBS, country experiences show wide variation in screening. We have heard from Ethiopia, Gambia, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria and look forward to hearing from other countries.
The Group B Strep International links to guidelines from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. https://www.groupbstrepinternational.org/gbs-organizations--guidelines-w...
Perhaps it could be useful to build a comprehensive table of countries, whether they have a national guideline, and whether the guideline recommends universal screening, risk-based screening or another approach.
It would also be interesting to track how this table changes over time.
We would expect the WHO global guideline to encourage many countries to consider adoption of universal screening. Perhaps some of the people in our current CHIFA discussion will be personally involved in this deliberation.
The above also raises the wider question of the capacity of national policymakers and public health leaders in each country to assess the global GBS guideline and whether and how this may be adapted and adopted for national policy. This in turn requires synthesis of global evidence (which has already been done by WHO) with local evidence (including evidence not only from research but also from civil society: https://www.hifa.org/projects/support-systems-how-can-decision-making-pr... ).
This global-local synthesis is clearly a weak spot in the global evidence ecosystem. More could be done to support countries to adapt and use guidelines.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org