Ishtiakul Islam Khan

• Master of Public Health
• Medical Officer at International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research

Treatment of life-threatening diarrheal illness in rural areas of Bangladesh relies on the training and accessibility of informal healthcare providers such as village doctors (VDs). We found that VDs located closer to main roads were more likely to be government-trained, but just as likely to administer intravenous fluids.

Background Both SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccines elicit immunological responses. However, it is difficult to distinguish responses generated after vaccination versus natural infection. Methods We investigated SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor-binding domain (RBD) and nucleocapsid-specific IgG and RBD specific IgG subclasses (IgG1, IgG2, IgG3 and...

Rural Bangladesh faces challenges of limited health care resources and a shortage of health care professionals. Informal providers, particularly village doctors, fill this void by being a first point of care and a bridge to the formal health care system. This study explores formally trained physicians’ perspectives on village doctors’ role in the h...

Background Accurate and reliable diagnostics, including rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs), are critical components of cholera control programs, though their performance has varied greatly across studies. While poorly understood, this variability may be due to the reference assay choice, patient-level and/or sampling characteristics, which hinder test r...

Village doctors in Bangladesh expressed broad interest in clinical decision support tools for pediatric diarrheal disease management and described their willingness to alter their antibiotic dispensing practices if guided by one. Future research should evaluate the tool’s impact on appropriate antibiotic use and patient outcomes.

Background: Informally trained health care providers, such as village doctors in Bangladesh, are crucial in providing health care services to the rural poor in low- and middle-income countries. Despite being one of the primary vendors of antibiotics in rural Bangladesh, village doctors often have limited knowledge about appropriate antibiotic use,...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a major cause of acute jaundice in South Asia. Gaps in our understanding of transmission are driven by non-specific symptoms and scarcity of diagnostics, impeding rational control strategies. In this context, serological data can provide important proxy measures of infection. We enrolled a population-representative serolo...

Our understanding of cholera transmission and burden largely relies on clinic-based surveillance, which can obscure trends, bias burden estimates and limit the impact of targeted cholera-prevention measures. Serological surveillance provides a complementary approach to monitoring infections, although the link between serologically derived infection...

Background Understanding the characteristics of the humoral immune responses following COVID-19 vaccinations is crucial for refining vaccination strategies and predicting immune responses to emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. Methods A longitudinal analysis of SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor binding domain (RBD) specific IgG antibody responses, encompassing...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a major cause of acute jaundice in South Asia. Gaps in our understanding of transmission are driven by non-specific symptoms and scarcity of diagnostics, impeding rational control strategies. In this context, serological data can provide important proxy measures of infection. We enrolled a population-representative serolo...

Despite focusing on cholera burden, epidemiologic studies in Bangladesh tend to be limited in geographic scope. National-level cholera surveillance data can help inform cholera control strategies and assess the effectiveness of preventive measures. Hospital-based sentinel surveillance among patients with suspected diarrhea in different sites across...

Our understanding of cholera transmission and burden largely rely on clinic-based surveillance, which can obscure trends, bias burden estimates and limit the impact of targeted cholera-prevention measures. Serologic surveillance provides a complementary approach to monitoring infections, though the link between serologically-derived infections and...

Background: Over 700,000 Myanmar nationals known as the 'Rohingyas' fled into Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, in late 2017. Due to this huge displacement into unhygienic areas, these people became vulnerable to communicable diseases including cholera. Assessing the risk, the Government of Bangladesh (GoB), with the help of the International Centre for Di...

Viruses that induce pulmonary difficulties and auto‐inflammation are more common in people with Down syndrome. They also have a higher number of comorbidities associated with a worse prognosis than the overall population. Adult patients with acute COVID‐19 are increasingly being diagnosed with Long COVID. However, patients with Down syndrome with l...

The consequence of good diabetic treatment depends on the patient’s commitment to a large degree. Noncompliance leads to inadequacy of metabolic control, which strengthens the advancement and speeds up diabetic complications. The study’s main goal was to assess the treatment noncompliance level among patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in...

A March-June 2021 representative serosurvey among Sitakunda subdistrict (Chattogram, Bangladesh) residents found an adjusted prevalence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 antibodies of 64.1% (95% credible interval 60.0%-68.1%). Before the Delta variant surge, most residents had been infected, although cumulative confirmed coronaviru...

Bangladesh recently faced large outbreaks of both COVID‐19 and dengue. We present a case of COVID‐19 and dengue coinfection in a patient who presented with hemoptysis. Our results demonstrate that COVID‐19 and dengue fever are both public health issues in Bangladesh and other dengue‐endemic nations and that they can coexist.

Introduction: The consequence of good diabetic treatment depends on the patient's commitment to a large degree. Noncompliance leads to inadequacy of metabolic control, which strengthens the advancement and speeds up diabetic complications. The study's main goal was to assess the treatment noncompliance level among patients with type-2 diabetes mell...

Bangladesh recently faced large outbreaks of both COVID-19 and Dengue fever. A 28-year-old woman suffered from symptoms including hemoptysis as first presentation followed by high-grade fever, sore throat, and fatigue. SARS-CoV-2 was confirmed by RT-PCR and also diagnosed dengue later on.COVID-19 and dengue fever could be a harmful combination.

The absence of population-based seroprevalence estimates in Bangladesh have impeded efforts to understand the relatively low reported mortality and incidence rates of SARS-CoV-2 in this country. We report findings of a representative serosurvey of the Sitakunda subdistrict in the Chattogram division of Bangladesh before a nationwide lockdown in Apr...