Bandim Health Project:
A health and demographic surveillance system site situated in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa
Bandim Health Project
Bandim Health Project follows a population of more than 200,000 individuals in urban and rural Guinea-Bissau. This provides a unique platform for conducting health research. One of the major research areas is to study the “real life” effects of vaccines, vitamin A and other health interventions to women and children. Other research areas include malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.
Bandim Health Project is a collaboration between the Guinean Ministry of Health and University of Southern Denmark. Formally, it is placed under the Guinean National Institute of Public Health. The main offices are placed in the suburb Bandim. The Danish part of the group group is hosted at the Danish National Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark.
WE ARE PROUD
Non-specific effects of vaccines named a vaccine milestone by Nature
The world-leading scientific journal “Nature” has made a list of the major milestones in vaccines. The discovery of the beneficial non-specific effects of live attenuated vaccines made by Peter Aaby in 1984 was one of them (milestone 13).
Bandim books
Bandim Health Project have published three books in the last 40 years with “Forty years of contradicting conventional wisdom 1978 – 2018” being the latest.
How vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected | Christine Stabell Benn | TEDxAarhus
BANDIM PROFILE OF THE MONTH
Peter Aaby
Peter Aaby
Peter Aaby (Danish, born 1944 in Lund, Sweden) is trained as an anthropologist but also holds a doctoral degree in medicine. In 1978, Peter Aaby established the Bandim Health Project, a Health and Demographic Surveillance System site in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. Aaby is credited for the discovery of non-specific effects of vaccines – i.e. effects of vaccines, which go beyond the specific protective effects against the targeted diseases.
NONSEnse
A NordForsk-funded consortium to study childhood morbidity and potential non-specific effects of the childhood vaccination programs in the Nordic countries