Last Updated: 18/06/2024
Sweden-Kenya science venture for malaria eradication in Tropical Africa
Objectives
This project specifically aims to examine:
1) the strategy of radical mass drug administration (MDA) in concert with vector control to eliminate malaria
2) the roles of community in malaria elimination 3) the values of malaria elimination for an equitable and sustainable development in Tropical Africa.
Today malaria eradication is on the global agenda. It is however not yet clear how feasible in Tropical Africa. An essential question is left unanswered: how can the malaria free situation be sustained in a long run? Islands provide natural experiments. On Aneityum island in Vanuatu, Oceania malaria was eliminated in 1991 with a short-term mass drug administration (MDA), sustained vector control and surveillance (Kaneko 2000 Lancet). Malaria freedom has been maintained up to now with a community-directed strategy. This project applied the Aneityum strategy to islands in Lake Victoria with high malaria transmission to examine whether malaria can be eliminated by an aggressive attack and whether malaria freedom can be maintained in Tropical Africa. The outcomes can serve as a model for the proposal of community-directed strategies for sustainable malaria freedom to follow the short-term push by external donors. Along with an ambitious goal the team intend to establish new research ties between Sweden and Kenya to conduct collaborative research of high scientific quality, which is essential to plan and submit a further collaborative research proposal to expand ideas towards global malaria eradication.
Jan 2013 — Dec 2015
$112,895
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