- The 254 Report
- Posts
- Africa's Newborn Crisis Has a Name Most Mothers Have Never Heard. These Scientists Want to Change That.
Africa's Newborn Crisis Has a Name Most Mothers Have Never Heard. These Scientists Want to Change That.
Gerald Kombo
February 23, 2026
[PHOTO: Nexsen Limited exhibition booth at ISSAD 2026, Hyatt Regency Westlands, Nairobi]
A former FIGO president exposes Kenya's missing maternal vaccination guidelines. A South African clinician-researcher reveals 25 years of stagnant data. An Australian nanotechnologist unveils a 20-minute rapid test that could bypass Africa's laboratory bottleneck. All at the first GBS summit ever held in East Africa.
On February 23, 2026, the 4th International Symposium on Streptococcus Agalactiae Disease (ISSAD) opened at the Hyatt Regency Westlands in Nairobi, the first time this global summit on Group B Streptococcus has been held in East Africa. Three voices dominated the day: Professor Anne-Beatrice Kihara, Kenya's most senior obstetrician-gynaecologist and immediate past President of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (FIGO); Professor Ziyaad Dangor, Clinical Research Director at Wits VIDA (Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Soweto; and Distinguished Professor Vipul Bansal, an Indian-born Australian nanotechnologist who has spent 15 years building diagnostic tools at RMIT University's Sir Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility, speaking to The 254 Report at the Nexsen Limited exhibition booth ahead of his formal presentation on Day 2.
Together, they framed the central paradox of GBS in Africa: the continent carries the heaviest burden but has the least data, fewest guidelines, and almost no access to the tools that could change the trajectory.
"Where Is the Sub-Saharan African Data?"
GBS colonises roughly 20 million pregnant women each year. It passes from mother to infant during delivery, causing an estimated 400,000 infant infections, more than 90,000 deaths, and tens of thousands of stillbirths globally, with sub-Saharan Africa disproportionately affected.
Professor Kihara, who was a technical advisor to Kenya's Beyond Zero Campaign, has published over 110 scientific papers, served as President of both the African Federation of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (AFOG) and the Kenya Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society (KOGS), and was profiled by The Lancet upon her FIGO presidency, opened the symposium with a direct challenge.
"I was very attentive to the data. Where is sub-Saharan African data? There's a big hole, a big hole."
She cited a recent Kenyan scoping review highlighting substantial maternal colonisation, vertical transmission, and strong associations with preterm birth and neonatal sepsis.
The economic argument, she stressed, is as powerful as the clinical one.
"Modelling studies demonstrate that maternal GBS vaccination will be highly cost-effective in high-burden settings such as ours, averting substantial treatment costs, disability-adjusted life years, and productivity losses. Prevention is more affordable and equitable than managing neonatal intensive care and lifelong disability."
"We Don't Speak to Each Other"
Kihara surveyed the room systematically. How many paediatricians? Gynaecologists? Midwives? Researchers? The fragmented show of hands proved her thesis.
"Clearly, we're isolated. We don't speak to each other, and therefore we cannot possibly talk about better care and better outcomes. We have to rethink how we collaborate as multidisciplinary teams, for action, from evidence."
Her critique extended beyond clinical silos to the disconnect between researchers and communities.
"It's not enough to put your efforts into the conversation of patient outcomes and neonatal outcomes without the advocates. We've got to have a voice and agency to the communities that must be the consumers. As you undertake research, please put that line that speaks to advocacy and accountability."
Kenya Has No Maternal Vaccination Guidelines
Kihara's most striking revelation was aimed squarely at Kenya's health policy infrastructure.
"Do we have maternal vaccination guidelines locally? Those in Kenya? It's not there. When you go to South Africa, you will find it. When you go to Northern Africa, you will find it. But we are yet to move from tetanus toxoid. Where are the pre-pregnancy, intra-pregnancy, and post-pregnancy vaccination guidelines? We need your help."
This means that even when a GBS vaccine is licensed, Kenya has no framework to embed it into routine antenatal care. No guideline. No screening protocol. No delivery mechanism beyond what individual clinicians improvise.
She situated her call within the African Union's broader push for continental vaccine manufacturing and South-South partnerships.
"We need to articulate the new public health order for Africa. The African Union is very clear. We need to do vaccine manufacturing. We need partnerships. There is work to be done."
GBS as a Global Health Security Issue
Kihara pushed the conversation beyond maternity wards. She placed GBS alongside COVID-19 and Mpox as a cross-border health threat amplified by migration and population movement.
"With the migrants and sections of the population moving back and forth amongst different populations, we shouldn't overlook that."
She called for urgent action on surveillance, epidemiological profiling of early and late-onset disease, and genotypic variation mapping, the kind of data needed to design a vaccination programme that actually matches the pathogen circulating in African populations.
"It must be done with urgency and intent."
Dangor: 25 Years of Data, No Decline
Professor Ziyaad Dangor, a paediatric pulmonologist at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital in Soweto who completed his doctoral thesis on the clinical and immunological epidemiology of GBS disease, presented the global epidemiological picture from the Wits VIDA platform.
His conclusion slide laid it bare. GBS is a common cause of sepsis and meningitis. Trends in high-income countries show minimal or no decline in incidence over 25 years of data. Intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis has reached its saturation point. And huge data gaps persist, with very little coming out of Africa and Asia.
"Nothing is changing. IAP has reached its saturation point. Huge gaps continue. We see very little data still coming out of Africa and Asia."
Dangor emphasised that we need to be counting all babies with sepsis and meningitis and improving etiological investigation. He laid out the path forward: modelling with genomic data and an invasive index, surveillance systems set up ahead of vaccine effectiveness studies, better data linkage to national e-cohorts. In some settings, the only endpoints would be all-cause sepsis and all-cause neonatal mortality, because the infrastructure to measure anything more specific does not yet exist.
"We'll only see the true burden of GBS disease once we start these vaccine effectiveness studies. I don't think we're going to get more data to show us that."
Risk-based screening, he noted during the panel discussion, misses nearly 50% of women whose infants develop early-onset GBS disease.
"That doesn't dismiss the efforts that we should try to screen pregnant women. It does not dismiss the efforts that we should provide intrapartum access for women at risk. We need to advocate for that until the vaccine does come out."
The panel also revealed a devastating statistic. Across five African countries where a million babies are being entered into a research dataset, 90% of neonates presenting with sepsis receive antibiotics. Only 3% receive a blood culture first.
"We don't have a culture of doing cultures. We don't expect results back. We don't chase them. We don't make them happen."
The failure is not laboratory capacity. The labs can do it. Blood culture rates have gone up by more than 10% per year in hospitals actively working on it.
"So it can be done. But we need to change our narrative. What must be measured, we can measure."
Long-term developmental follow-up of GBS survivors is equally challenging. The success of Danish and Dutch communities has been their national datasets, where patients have been followed through electronic health records for long periods. No such infrastructure exists in most African countries.
Kenya's Digital Health Hub may eventually address this. A meeting last week in Kenya focused on coding neonatal datasets with ID linkage to child data systems within the country's electronic medical records. But that infrastructure is still being built.
"We need to have national data systems that will answer this."
Bansal: A 20-Minute Test That Fits in Your Palm
At the Nexsen Limited exhibition booth, Professor Vipul Bansal spoke to The 254 Report about a technology that directly addresses the infrastructure problem both Kihara and Dangor described. Bansal is scheduled to formally present StrepSure® on Day 2 of ISSAD 2026, during the Advancements in Diagnostics breakout session on Tuesday at 4 PM EAT.
Bansal is Chief Innovation Officer and Chair of the Advisory Board at ASX-listed Nexsen Limited (ASX:NXN), and Founding Director of RMIT University's Sir Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility in Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) with over 15 years in nano-diagnostic development.
He explained the fundamental flaw in current GBS screening: it happens around week 36 to 37 of pregnancy, but the bacteria can change between that test and the moment of labour. Traditional culture-based testing takes two to three days to grow the bacteria to detectable levels. By the time the result arrives, it may no longer reflect reality.
"Because this bacteria can change, there's a loss of trust in the current GBS testing."
StrepSure: 20 Minutes. No Electricity. No Lab.
Nexsen's answer is StrepSure®, a lateral-flow rapid diagnostic test that uses proprietary ultra-bright nanoparticles and high-affinity bioreceptors to detect GBS within 20 minutes at the point of care.
"What we are doing at Nexsen is developing a very simple tool which looks like a pregnancy strip or the COVID rapid kit. It is very, very sensitive. You don't have to multiply bacteria over days. Within 20 minutes, we can detect GBS in the labour ward."
The products require no electricity, no laboratory infrastructure, and no technical skill sets, three barriers that cripple diagnostics across much of sub-Saharan Africa.
In practice, a midwife or health worker takes a swab from a pregnant woman in labour, applies it to the StrepSure strip, and within 20 minutes a visible line indicates whether GBS is present. If positive, intrapartum antibiotics can be administered immediately, preventing transmission to the infant during delivery. This bypasses the entire laboratory chain.
Bansal was transparent about the product's status.
"This product is not yet available for clinical use. It's called StepSure. It is going through the regulatory approval process. We expect it to be available very soon, but at the moment, it's a research-only product."
Clinical trials commenced in late 2025 at Northern Health in Victoria, Australia. In January 2026, Nexsen secured a AU$500,000 non-dilutive Federal Government grant to expand its GBS sensor technology into neonatal testing, the same platform retuned to detect GBS infections in newborns. The company has also initiated FDA engagement for U.S. market entry.
The Philanthropy Gap
For Africa, the question is not whether the technology works but who pays for deployment.
"For those mass deployments, we have to also look at the commercial side of things. It would be really useful if philanthropic organisations discuss with us and see how we can work together as a company. We also want to help the nation. I myself come from India and I've seen the GBS problems there. We want to help, but we also need support, as happened in the vaccine area."
His appeal mirrors the public-private partnerships that enabled COVID-19 rapid test rollout across Africa through the Africa CDC, GAVI, and the Global Fund. Without similar structures for GBS, even the most elegant technology remains confined to high-income markets.
What This Means for Kenya
ISSAD 2026 in Nairobi is not a routine academic conference. It is the first time the global GBS research community has convened in East Africa, with attendees from 37 countries across four continents, a deliberate choice given that the region sits at the epicentre of the burden. Three actionable gaps emerged from Day 1:
Policy. Kenya needs maternal vaccination guidelines that go beyond tetanus toxoid, covering pre-pregnancy, intra-pregnancy, and post-pregnancy immunisation. South Africa and North Africa already have them.
Diagnostics. Point-of-care rapid tests like StrepSure could bypass the laboratory bottleneck, but need philanthropic or institutional support for mass deployment in low-income settings.
Data systems. Surveillance systems need to be set up ahead of vaccine effectiveness studies. The Kenya Digital Hub and neonatal dataset coding initiatives must be accelerated. Modelling with genomic data and better linkage to national e-cohorts is essential.
"We need to articulate the new public health order for Africa. The African Union is very clear. We need vaccine manufacturing. We need partnerships. There is work to be done."
Prof. Anne-Beatrice Kihara is immediate past President of FIGO (2023 to 2025) and Senior Lecturer, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Nairobi. Prof. Ziyaad Dangor is Clinical Research Director at Wits VIDA, University of the Witwatersrand, and a paediatric pulmonologist at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, Soweto. Prof. Vipul Bansal is Distinguished Professor at RMIT University and Chief Innovation Officer, Nexsen Limited (ASX:NXN). ISSAD 2026 runs February 23 to 25, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya.
Reply