Other Wellcome Trust activities in Thailand and South-east Asia

The Wellcome Trust is committed to spending some £80 million a year on health research in low- and middle- income countries between 2008 and 2012. Since its inception, the Trust has been a strong supporter of research in the tropical regions of the world and supports major research programmes in Africa and Asia.

The Trust's Major Overseas Programmes in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos receive financial, logistical and administrative support from the University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine - one of four UK centres funded since 1995 to focus support for the Trust's tropical medicine fellowship schemes. The Oxford Centre provides a UK base for researchers engaged in projects outside the country.

The Trust funds other activities in Thailand. A national cohort study conducted by researchers from the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand and the Australian National University has looked at the impact of socioeconomic development on the changing patterns of disease in Thailand. The Trust has also supported a study looking at pregnancy and childbirth disorders in South-east Asia, including a grant to enable Thai researchers to continue their collaboration with researchers from the University of Sydney, Australia. Elsewhere, a separate team from the University of Sydney, alongside colleagues from University Malaysia Sarawak, received funding to study the distribution and virulence markers of enterovirus 71 encephalitis, an emerging infectious disease in the Asia-Pacific region, and develop a strain that might form the basis of a vaccine.

See the map of Thailand and Laos.