The Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC), north of the country, is one of Ghana’s best in malaria research activities.
The NHRC is located at the Kassena-Nankana district of northern Ghana and was established in 1989 as a field site for a Vitamin A Supplementation Trial (VAST). Following the successful completion of this trial, the Ministry of Health adopted the site in 1992, to serve as one of its research centers with the mandate to investigate the health problems affecting the northern sector of the country and to inform policy makers.
In keeping with its mandate, the majority of work done in Navrongo has been in the area of communicable diseases such as malaria, diarrheal diseases, cerebro-spinal meningitis, maternal health and adolescent sexual and reproductive health and lymphatic filariasis.
A number of the findings of the studies have been adopted into the national policy in Ghana and in the international health community. These include the administration of Vitamin A to infants, the use of impregnated bed nets in malaria control and the community-based approach to health delivery and provision of family planning services.

Current Malaria Research Activities:  
The Birth Cohort Study
The Centre is conducting a malaria study to follow up the over 2000 newborn babies recruited into a Birth Cohort Study. These children will be followed up till they are five years of age. The Centre is measuring various aspects of malaria infections including mild malaria episodes, severe malaria and malaria mortality. This information would increase the ability to detect associations between host genetic and immunological factors associated with resistance to malaria morbidity and mortality.

Home management of acute febrile illnesses in northern Ghana using artesunate–amodiaquine combination: The role of rapid malaria diagnostic testing.
This study aims to establish the potential benefits of incorporating rapid malaria diagnostic testing for the home management of malaria and other febrile illnesses at the community level. This is to ensure that the recently introduced combination therapies ( ACTs) are at least targeted at patients with a higher probability of malaria.  And those patients with other febrile illness could be appropriately treated as opposed to treating all childhood febrile illness with antimalarial and antibiotics as it currently pertains.  The Centre would therefore assess the impact of rapid diagnostic testing kits (RDTs) on full clinical recovery rate from acute febrile illness following treatment using ACTs and /or antibiotics at the community or household level and to establish the cost effectiveness of RDTs use in the home management of acute febrile illness. Children 6 – 59 months of age resident  in the communities with acute febrile illness constitute the study population.

Other Activities
The Centre facilitates field activities of students from the Ghana School of Public Health, Community Health Nursing Training School, the INDEPTH-Network-sponsored programme at the University of Witwatersrand, and the Georgetown University, USA. During these field visits, students get the opportunity to carry out independent research studies with the support of a mentor or supervisor.

The Centre has a rich manpower of epidemiologists, demographers, social scientists, anthropologists, clinicians, biostatisticians and bioethicist who are responsible for developing and leading core research proposals. To strengthen the knowledge and skills of the human resource, a number of the staff are given the opportunity to participate in training programmes, conferences and workshops both nationally and internationally to present scientific papers based on research conducted by the Centre.

Dr. Abraham Hodgson is the Director of the Navrongo Health Research Centre, a field station of the Ghana Health Service.  A medical officer by training, he received his medical degree from the University of Ghana Medical School in 1986, a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the School of Public Health in Ghana in 1997 and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Basel, Switzerland in 2002.  

Professionally, Dr. Hodgson has served as a Senior Medical Officer of the Effia-Nkwanta hospital in Sekondi, Ghana, a District Medical officer of the Wassa Amenfi District, Ghana and a Clinical Research Officer of the Navrongo Health Research Centre.

His research experiences have been in the area of Infectious Diseases and he currently leads the Malaria, Meningitis and Rotavirus teams in Navrongo. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and has thirty-eight publications to his credit.

The Health Research Centre is one of the centers chosen across Africa to participate in the INDEPTH Effectiveness and Safety Studies of Anti-malarial Drugs In Africa (INESS) project.

THE INESS PHASE IV SAFETY AND   EFFECTIVENESS STUDY

The goal of this initiative is to provide national, regional and international health decision makers with independent and objective evidence on safety and the effectiveness of new antimalarial drugs as a basis for malaria treatment policy in Africa. 

This four year project aims to undertake Phase IV safety and effectiveness studies of new combination therapies (and other drugs and vaccines) for malaria in at least 8 INDEPTH Demographic Surveillance System (DSS) sites in 4 countries of Africa. This  the project intends to do by enhancing and maintaining independent capacity of these countries and to use this to facilitate and accelerate the development of more evidence-informed policy for malaria treatment for new products in the global drug development pipeline .

It will operate with two specific objectives:

• To develop and maintain a Phase IV Safety and Effectiveness Studies Platform in Africa.
• To assess the effectiveness of new malaria treatments and its determinants in real life health systems in Africa.

In addition it will evaluate safety of new malaria treatments through comprehensive pharmacovigilance in an African health systems context.

 This project effectively creates the missing final section of the drug development pipeline for Africa to ensure rapid access to practical evidence on safety and treatment effectiveness from local experience. The main product of the platform is a longitudinal evidence base to allow assessment of efficacious drugs in real life settings. The main purpose is to minimize the time gap between licensure and adoption of new anti-malarials by providing objective endemic country safety and effectiveness data that will help inform global and national policy and practice.
 This project will also enhance the capacity of Africa to conduct pharmacovigilance in large populations and to monitor local health systems in order to track costs, effective coverage, and effects of new or alternative post-registration antimalarial treatments.  The selected countries have a diverse range of health systems capacity and malaria endemicity and are sufficiently representative for policy making.