 My name is Victor Alec, and I'm a career researcher at Cambridge Welcome Trust in Nairobi, and most of my research focuses on infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. I effectively do research around malaria and childhood illnesses. And I look also at other things, such as interventions in health. I look at how the impact interventions have on population. I also lately have diversified into not just malaria, but also looking at the whole burden of infectious diseases in Africa. As my research focuses on burden estimation, particularly on malaria, I think that health statistics are quite important on several things. The first is that health statistics are vital for us to understand what the burden of disease is in the population. We need to know how many cases of disease burden occur in any single part of the country, or the countries, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, so that we can intervene appropriately. And that brings me to the second point, which is if we are intervening in population, we need to know what the impact those interventions are, and health statistics help us actually understand the impact of those interventions. Whether we are reducing disease burden or we are just not doing much. So I think my area of research is impactful on tropical illnesses, because then I am able to monitor some of the statistics I actually come up with on what's the health status of the population. So recently I've been looking at fibril malaria cases in Africa. And one of the things I wanted to understand is of all the fibril case burdens or the fever cases that we see in population in sub-Saharan Africa, how many of these actually are treated in various sectors. And my findings were quite highlighted some few important things. One is that out of the case burden we see on fevers, only half of those are treated in the public form or sectors that we know. The other half, of course, are treated in the private sector. Some are treated informally. But we don't have quite control on what happens in formal treatment. And we don't understand actually what happens to the other, even the ones which actually are treated in the private sector. We don't know the effective case management that actually goes on in those sectors. So my research was highlighting that we are only able to publicly handle 50%. Should we improve our public health systems? Should we incorporate private systems in decisions we make around health? And should we understand more about those cases that are actually treated outside the public sector? What are the effective case management approaches can we use for those who are actually informally or at community level? And those are sort of key questions that have raised my inquisition to actually try and understand what's going on with these other sectors outside the public sector basically. I think with the change in disease burden in Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the things that has been highlighted more in the last five or three years is the need for improved surveillance. So one of the things WTO enacted in 2012 was the T3 initiative, which you treat, you test, you treat, and then you track the particular case you're looking at. And this is the whole framework of surveillance. And it has developed in the sense that we are starting to appreciate the use of routine sectors, or the public sectors as I've explained, or we are trying to understand more what is happening to routine cases that actually come to the health facilities. How do we treat them? We are trying to improve treatment practices. We do have effective medicine that has improved over the last five or 10 years, basically in malaria, for example. And since May 2006, the use of ACTs have improved treatment of malaria. In terms of testing, we have improved diagnostics. We now have RDDs, rapid tests that can actually be used in formal settings at a community level to just test whether someone has disease or they don't have a disease before you treat them. And that actually improves if a case is not malaria, then it will help our clinician try and find out what other disease could the child be hovering and effectively handle that case. So we've improved issues on how we handle cases. Research has improved in this area over the last five years. I think that's one of the most effective things we've done when it comes to disease burden. My line of research at the moment focuses around improving the burden estimation, disease burden estimation. If you look at the last 10 years or so, malaria mapping, for example, has improved tremendously. We've collected more community surveys. We've understood what levels of prevalence of disease are at the community level. But we haven't appreciated the use of routine data more and how we could use effectively to actually quantify this burden in the population. And my line of research has focused in this area of using routine data because with the change in burden, we are trying to strengthen surveillance, strengthen surveillance approaches like the T3 initiative to contribute tremendously on how we then estimate our health statistics. And this is the reason why we need to invest more in routine systems. We need to invest more in the science of how we use routine systems to estimate disease burden because it doesn't cost as much. We already have the health facilities, for example. We know people come to these health facilities. My research has focused on understanding how people use these systems. And we need to invest more to actually try and improve how we estimate disease burden using these routine systems. They are the best barometers of diseases in the population not just malaria, but a whole load of infectious burden in Sub-Saharan Africa. Transmissional medicine focuses on or has themes around diagnosis, treatment, as well as management of these cases of medicine, basically. For malaria, one of the things I have highlighted is that we are now using this test T3 initiative, which is actually testing, treating and then tracking. And over the past few years, we have tremendously improved the first T's, which is to test and to treat. We have not really done much around tracking. And tracking of infections has to do with surveillance in the community following up cases when disease burden is now low, our cases are now rare. And this obviously fits in perfectly with the transition of medicine around case management and surveillance activities and so on. So there is a relationship between what I do and what happens with the transition of medicine themes and the two fitting together.