 Mi heddiw i'r podcas yma o'r meddwl yma. Oeddaeth Dr Susanna Danaheau y gafodd i'r rheswch yn gyfosigol amgylcheddau mwyfio ar y cyfrannu yn ymgyrch. Rhaid Susanna, ac rwy'n cael ei ddweud i'r dweud y ddweud y ddyddai'r llwyddoedd? Rwy'n cael ei ddweud i'r ddweud yn bencof Taelan ar 4 ymddangos. Diolch i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Ddweud i'r meleioidosis, scrup tyffusau a mylaria. The main disease I studied was melioidosis. This is a disease many people haven't heard of. It's a gram-negative bacterium called Bercaldiria pseudomalei that lives in the environment and causes a lot of disease in Thailand, Southeast Asia and Northern Australia. The disease it causes is a sepsis illness where people come to hospital and they might have a bad pneumonia, they might have sepsis and blood poisoning, perhaps renal dysfunction or abscesses and really the disease can cause anything. Unfortunately it has a really high mortality rate so the hospital I worked in in northeast Thailand, the mortality of patients coming to hospital with melioidosis was around 40% and this was when they got the correct antibiotics in ITU care. Are some people more likely to get this disease than others? Yes, so the main people who get them are people with diabetes, two-thirds of the people in my study had diabetes, type 2 diabetes and other people have some problem with their immune system such as renal disease, chronic lung disease, drinking too much alcohol or older age. What can you do to help these patients? So I'm an immunologist as well as a physician and my work is trying to find a vaccine for melioidosis and other other bugs that hide inside cells and what I have been doing is I set up a longitudinal study of patients with melioidosis and I tracked these people over a year and I was trying to see how people fight the disease naturally so I take people's blood and I look at the white blood cells and try to see which bits of the bacteria or which antigens their white blood cells are making immune response to and trying to understand the pathways involved to get protection and once we understand that it can help us to design a vaccine which we would then use to target at-risk people such as diabetics in the region. What are the most important lines of research that have emerged in the last five to ten years? For melioidosis? Yes. There's a lot of research done at the Mahadol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit where I was based. I have Thai colleagues who are working on therapies. There have been some really outstanding drug trials for example comparing two antibiotics head-to-head comparing follow-on tablet antibiotic regimens. A lot of research into diagnostics as well because it's difficult to diagnose and other research by colleagues trying to understand susceptibility why some people get it and others don't. Why does this line of work matter? Why should we put money into it? Melioidosis is a neglected tropical disease. It's actually a major killer in northeast Thailand. It's one of the biggest infectious killers up there with HIV and TB and it's very very under-recognised. The hospital I was working in had 400 cases a year and it's likely that many other hospitals in the region have these numbers as well although it's not always accurately diagnosed. In fact if you go looking you will find it right across Southeast Asia including in countries with very large populations such as India and Bangladesh, Indonesia. So at the moment my colleagues are working on the epidemiology to try to define just how many people are affected but potentially over a billion people are living in countries known to have melioidosis. How does your work fit for the Translational Medicine within the Department? What we see is a lot of disease and death from melioidosis and if we are able to find a vaccine we would then be able to take it forward, test it out in models, test it in clinical trials and then get a vaccine to people to stop them getting sick and dying. That's very interesting Suzanna. Thank you very much. Thank you.