Malaria

Background In 2017, an estimated 14 million cases of Plasmodium vivax malaria were reported from Asia, Central and South America, and the Horn of Africa. The clinical burden of vivax malaria is largely driven by its ability to form dormant liver stages (hypnozoites) that can reactivate to cause recurrent episodes of malaria. Elimination of both…

Molecular data and analysis outputs are being integrated into malaria surveillance efforts to provide valuable programmatic insights for national malaria control programs (NMCPs). A plethora of studies from diverse geographies have demonstrated that malaria parasite genetic data can be an important tool for drug resistance monitoring, species identification, outbreak analysis, and transmission characterization. Despite many…

Background Malaria elimination is the goal for Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea. Intensive interventions implemented since 2004 have reduced prevalence, but progress has stalled in recent years. A challenge for elimination has been malaria infections in residents acquired during travel to mainland Equatorial Guinea. The present article quantifies how off-island contributes to remaining malaria prevalence on…

Estimates of the global burdens of morbidity attributable to acute attacks of Plasmodium falciparum malaria typically dwarf those of Plasmodium vivax, i.e., hundreds of millions versus tens of millions of cases. Global burden estimates take no account of latent and subpatent reservoirs of infections carrying more subtle burdens of illness and death in impoverished settings…

Background Malaria incidence has plateaued in Sub-Saharan Africa despite Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention’s (SMC) introduction. Community health workers (CHW) use a door-to-door delivery strategy to treat children with SMC drugs, but for SMC to be as effective as in clinical trials, coverage must be high over successive seasons. Methods We developed and used a microplanning model…

Malaria infections occurring below the limit of detection of standard diagnostics are common in all endemic settings. However, key questions remain surrounding their contribution to sustaining transmission and whether they need to be detected and targeted to achieve malaria elimination. In this study we analyse a range of malaria datasets to quantify the density, detectability,…

Background The propensity of different Anopheles mosquitoes to bite humans instead of other vertebrates influences their capacity to transmit pathogens to humans. Unfortunately, determining proportions of mosquitoes that have fed on humans, i.e. Human Blood Index (HBI), currently requires expensive and time-consuming laboratory procedures involving enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) or polymerase chain reactions (PCR). Here,…