A powerful new weapon could one day join the global fight against malaria, especially to help people who need temporary protection from the deadly disease. Drugs and bed nets can to some extent already protect against the disease, which still sickens at least 200 million people a year and kills an estimated 400,000. Vaccines have also shown some promise.
The scale-up of malaria control efforts has led to marked reductions in malaria burden over the past twenty years, but progress has slowed. Implementation of indoor residual spraying (IRS) of insecticide, a proven vector control intervention, has been limited and difficult to sustain partly because questions remain on its added impact over widely accepted interventions such as bed nets.
Advances in digitized video-tracking and behavioural analysis have enabled accurate recording and quantification of mosquito flight and host-seeking behaviours, facilitating development of individual (agent) based models at much finer spatial scales than previously possible.
Malaria remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the paediatric population in Malawi. Insecticide-treated bed nets are a key vector malaria control intervention, however, advancement towards universal access is progressing slowly. Malawi Malaria indicator surveys (MMIS) show diverse user preferences of bed net shape and colour. The objective of this work was to understand if bed net shape and colour preferences affect usage.
African houses are frequently too hot and uncomfortable to use a bed net at night. Indoor thermal comfort is often evaluated by measuring temperature and humidity, ignoring ventilation. This study explored ways to measure ventilation in single-roomed rural Gambian houses during the malaria transmission season and evaluated building designs that could increase airflow at night and help keep the occupants comfortable.
Malaria burden in Zambia has significantly declined over the last decade because of improved coverage of several key malaria interventions (e.g., vector control, case management, bed net distributions, and enhanced surveillance/responses). Campaign-based mass drug administration (MDA) and focal MDA (fMDA) were assessed in a trial in Southern Province, Zambia, to identify its utility in elimination efforts.
Bed net utilization is one of the important methods of malaria prevention. Malaria during pregnancy is one of the fatal diseases which mostly leads to the death of the mother and the fetus. Some of the complications of malaria during pregnancy are: intrauterine growth restrictions, intrauterine fetal death, and stillbirth. The main challenge of malaria treatment is that most of the anti-malarial drugs are not safe to use during pregnancy. The use of bed net is the most effective method of prevention of malaria during pregnancy. There is a paucity of information on bed net utilization among pregnant women in the study setting. Hence, this study aims to assess the trends of bed net utilization among pregnant women in Arba Minch Health and Demography Surveillance Site (HDSS), Southern Ethiopia.
Our analysis demonstrate that bed-net usage has a positive impact in reducing the reproduction number R. The results show that if 75% of the population were to use bed-nets, malaria could be eliminated.
