rowanshah/UCL-Engineering-Challenge-2

Working in inter-disciplinary teams to design and prototype certain technical aspects of a new Tuberculosis (TB) vaccine production facility in Uganda, Sub-Saharan Africa # UCL-Engineering-Challenge-2 Working in inter-disciplinary teams to design and prototype certain technical aspects of a new Tuberculosis (TB) vaccine production facility in Uganda, Sub-Saharan Africa Global Health: Challenge 2 The Challenge: Your task will be to work in inter-disciplinary teams to design and prototype certain technical aspects of a new Tuberculosis (TB) vaccine production facility in Uganda, Sub-Saharan Africa. You will work most closely with one other discipline in specialist teams consisting of: Biochemical Engineers, Chemical Engineers and Biomedical Engineers Civil Engineers and Mechanical Engineers Electrical Engineers and Computer Scientists The technical design work will take the majority of your time, but you will also be asked to consider the sustainability and human aspects of the context in which your engineering designs are required. Your brief - New vaccine for Tuberculosis The disease tuberculosis is caused by bacterial infection of the lungs by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is transmissible by coughing, which creates airborne droplets that infect the lungs. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) is a slow growing bacterium and once infection occurs it can lay dormant for many years. It is estimated that one third of the world's population is infected with a form of TB. According to the World Health Organisation (2017) there were 1.6 million deaths from TB in 2016, a rate which equates to one TB death every ten seconds. Millions of people are diagnosed and treated successfully each year and 10.4 million people fell ill with TB in the same year, but there are still large gaps in detection and treatment. In 2016, 6.3 million new cases of TB were reported, but this is only 61% of the estimated incidence of 10.4 million. A vaccine is available to combat TB. This is the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine. However, it has variable efficacy, ranging from 0-80% efficacy based upon geographic location, sub-type and strain variations …