SEMINAR SERIES | 19 March – Professor Quique Bassat

Details about our next lunchtime seminar are below: “Minimally invasive autopsy: An innovative post-mortem approach for under 5 mortality surveillance“ Speaker: Professor Quique Bassat, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) Venue: Manson Theatre, Keppel Street Date & time: Tuesday 19 March, 12:30 – 14:00pm There is a need for accurate estimates of cause of death (CoD) in low-income regions. Verbal autopsies and clinical records have shown to be imperfect tools and often inaccurate. Complete diagnostic autopsies (CDA), the gold standard proposed methodology for CoD determination are challenging to perform in most low-income settings due to their poor acceptability, and the scarce availability of facilities and human resources capable of conducting them. Minimally invasive autopsy (MIA), also known as Minimally Invasive Tissue Sampling (MITS) is a simplified post-mortem procedure involving body fluid and direct sampling of key organs using fine-needle biopsies, followed by pathology and microbiology analyses. As such, and anticipating a better acceptability due to the its minimally-invasive nature, MIAs could become an alternative to CDA. However, there is very limited information on its performance. In this session we will discuss the validation of the MIA tool against the CDA in a series of paediatric Mozambican deaths, and present data on their feasibility and acceptability when implemented as a mortality surveillance tool in a rural district in Southern Mozambique. We will also present the first generated data from their use in Mozambique as a mortality surveillance strategy in under 5s.