Rosemary Nzunza

Kenya Medical Research Institute | KEMRI · Centre for virus research

Objectives In subsistence populations, high physical activity is typically maintained throughout pregnancy. Market integration shifts activity patterns to resemble industrialized populations, with more time allocated to sedentary behavior. Daasanach semi‐nomadic pastoralists living in northern Kenya face lifestyle heterogeneity due to the emergence...

Background Pastoralists live in challenging environments, which may be accompanied by unique activity, energy, and water requirements. Aim Few studies have examined whether the demands of pastoralism contribute to differences in total energy expenditure (TEE) and water turnover (WT) compared to other lifestyles. Subjects and methods Accelerometer...

Background and objectives Non-communicable disease (NCD) risk and the epidemic of cardiometabolic diseases continue to grow across the expanding industrialized world. Probing the relationships between evolved human physiology and modern socioecological condition is central to understanding this health crisis. Therefore, we investigated the relation...

Objectives: Investigations of early childhood growth among small-scale populations are essential for understanding human life history variation and enhancing the ability to serve such communities through global public health initiatives. This study characterizes early childhood growth trajectories and identifies differences in growth patterns rela...

This article quantifies Daasanach water insecurity experiences in northern Kenya, examines how water insecurity is associated with water borrowing and psychosocial stress, and evaluates if water borrowing mitigates the stress from water insecurity. Of 133 households interviewed in seven communities, 94.0% were water insecure and 74.4% borrowed wate...

Objective Water plays a critical role in the production of food and preparation of nutritious meals, yet few studies have examined the relationship between water and food insecurity. The primary objective of this study, therefore, was to examine how experiences of household water insecurity (HWI) relate to experiences of household food insecurity (...

This article quantifies Daasanach water insecurity experiences in Northern Kenya, examines how water insecurity is associated with water borrowing and psychosocial stress, and evaluates if water borrowing mitigates the stress from water insecurity. Of 133 households interviewed in 7 communities, 95% were water insecure and 74.4% borrowed water thre...

Objectives: Thirst is an evolved central homeostatic feedback system that helps regulate body water for survival. Little research has examined how early development and exposure to extreme environments and water availability affect thirst perception, particularly outside Western settings. Therefore, we compared two indicators of perceived thirst (...

Background: Globally, tremendous improvement has been made in Polio eradication since its inception in 1988. For the third time in a decade, Kenya has experienced a Polio outbreak along the border with Somalia. The affected areas were in Garissa County, replete with previous occurrences in 2006 and 2012. This article, give an account of series of...

Water salinity is a growing global environmental health concern. However, little is known about the relation between water salinity and chronic health outcomes in non-coastal, lean populations. Daasanach pastoralists living in northern Kenya, traditionally rely on milk, yet are experiencing socioecological changes and have expressed concerns about...

Background: The poliovirus has been targeted for eradication since 1988. Kenya reported its last case of indigenous Wild Poliovirus (WPV) in 1984 but suffered from an outbreak of circulating Vaccine-derived Poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) in 2018. We aimed to describe Kenya's polio surveillance performance 2016-2018 using WHO recommended polio surveilla...

Chikungunya virus (family Togavirdae and genus Alphavirus) is an emerging and reemerging virus of public health importance both regionally and globally. In Kenya, about 50-60% of the suspected measles cases remain undiagnosed once measles and rubella is ruled out by immunoglobulin M (IgM) ELISA thus prompted the need to do differential diagnosis on...

Aims: This study compared the bag-mediated filtration system (BMFS) and standard WHO two-phase separation methods for poliovirus (PV) environmental surveillance, examined factors impacting PV detection, and monitored Sabin-like (SL) PV type 2 presence with withdrawal of oral polio vaccine type 2 (OPV2) in April 2016. Methods and results: Environ...

Objectives This study compared the prevalence of concentrated urine (urine specific gravity ≥1.021), an indicator of hypohydration, across Tsimane' hunter‐forager‐horticulturalists living in hot‐humid lowland Bolivia and Daasanach agropastoralists living in hot‐arid Northern Kenya. It tested the hypotheses that household water and food insecurity w...

Background Despite insecurity challenges in Somalia, key indicators for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) surveillance have met recommended targets. However, recent outbreaks of vaccine-derived polioviruses have raised concerns about possible gaps. We analyzed non-polio enterovirus (NPEV) and Sabin poliovirus isolation rates, to investigate whether com...

Introduction Measles is targeted for elimination in the World Health Organization African Region by the year 2020. In 2011, Kenya was off track in attaining the 2012 pre-elimination goal. We describe the epidemiology of measles in Kenya and assess progress made towards elimination. Methods We reviewed national case-based measles surveillance and i...

Serosurveys are useful for assessing population susceptibility to vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. Although at-risk populations in remote areas could benefit from this type of information, they face several logistical barriers to implementation, such as lack of access to centralized laboratories, cold storage, and transport of samples. We des...