Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS)

Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network aims to understanding causes of stillbirths and under-5 deaths in low-and-middle income countries. This is a multinational and long term initiative funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, initiated collection of specimens from December 2016. The project implemented minimally invasivel tissue sampling (MITS) method to collect biological samples from stillbirths and postmortem under-5 populaiton. Collected Blood and CSF are used to isolate infectious agents using microbial culture. Microbial isolates are identified using Vitek-2 system and further characterized using whole genome sequencing.