AMR Journey of Julhas

Julhas has been working on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), Consumption (AMC), and Usages (AMU) surveillance under the different grants like University of Oslo supported project on AMR interoperable application development for DHIS2, Fleming Fund supported projects in ten Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, and Laos), and Management Sciences for Health supported MTaPS GHSS project for Infection Prevention & Control (IPC) Programme and Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) including clinician engagement.

From 2018 to the end of 2019, he collaborated with the HISP India team with funding assistance from the DHIS2 team at the University of Oslo. During this time, Julhas was in charge of designing interoperable applications for a few Indian hospitals for AMR. At the time, he was introduced to WHONET software, and he later integarted WHONET AMR data with the DHIS2 platform. He also aided the WHONET core team in developing a mechanism within WHONET to export AMR data for DHIS2 visualisation. The apps are available on the Github repository.

From 2020 to the middle of 2022, he served as the country coordinator for the CAPTUAR project in Bangladesh. During that period, he worked with 45 private and public hospitals to support the digitisation of the Microbiology Laboratory data management process, to develop data analysis capacity of the laboratory people, to develop a centralised platform for data visualisation, interoperability development with the diverse applications from the different laboratories, to conduct online and in-person training, to link the data sources with the government platforms, to engage private sectors and to collect data. In addition, he collaborated with 105 hospital-based and retail pharmacies near microbiology laboratory to collect data on antimicrobial usage.

Photo: AMR Capacity Development

Julhas and his team were able to collect 1.1 million Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST) data from 34 laboratories in Bangladesh (10 public and 24 private) from 2016 to 2020. In parallel, they collected a total 7.5 million data on drugs sales from five hospital-based pharmacies between 2017 and 2020. Later, the obtained data was curated and uniformed by AMR experts to get ready for advanced analysis and dissemination.

Photo: Manual Data Digitization

Photo: Laboratory vist during COVID 19

Julhas and team organised a three-day workshop and data dissemination conference in Dhaka in May 2022, inviting 140 governmental and private sector stakeholders across Bangladesh. CAPTURA and its consortium members also participated from South Korea and the United States.

Photo: AMR Data Dessemination in Bangladesh

Julhas moved to Seoul, South Korea, in June 2022 after being offered an opportunity to work on the Global stage. Since then, he has been employed by the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) as a Researcher and Data Science Engineer in the Department of AMR. He is responsible for establishing data management and visualisation platforms, data analysis, capacity building, developing various protocols, and contributing scientific writing. He also supports IVI's AMR projects in South and Southeast Asian countries.

Photo: AMR Data Dessemination in Bangladesh

Photo: AMR Capacity Development at the Microbiology Lab

In December 2023, the CAPTURA project published country and facility-level reports based on data collected from labs to improve data quality and test practices. In addition, seven articles have been published in Oxford Clinical Infectious Disease Journals.

Throughout the time, Julhas had the chance to interact with eminent data scientists and microbiologists.

Photo: With WHONET Founder at IVI

Photo: Capacity Development in Malaysia

All credit goes to the Ministry's decision makers, laboratories, the CAPTURA project, and its extremely committed team at IVI, Fleming Fund, and Mott Macdonald.

© 2024 Julhas. All rights reserved.