Determinants of MDA impact and designing MDAs towards malaria elimination
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Mahidol University, Thailand
Abstract
Malaria remains at the forefront of scientific research and global political and funding agendas. Malaria models have consistently oversimplified how mass interventions are implemented. Here, we present an individual based, spatially explicit model of P. falciparum malaria transmission that includes all the programmatic implementation details of mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns. We uncover how the impact of MDA campaigns is determined by the interaction between implementation logistics, patterns of human mobility and how transmission risk is distributed over space. Our results indicate that malaria elimination is only realistically achievable in settings with very low prevalence and can be hindered by spatial heterogeneities in risk. In highly mobile populations, accelerating MDA implementation increases likelihood of elimination; if populations are more static, deploying less teams would be cost optimal. We conclude that mass drug interventions can be an invaluable tool towards malaria elimination in low endemicity areas, specifically when paired with effective vector control.
Data availability
The study presented here is purely theoretical and no data has been used apart from previously (and publicly available) data
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1110500)
- Sompob Saralamba
- Yoel Lubell
- Lisa J White
- Ricardo Aguas
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1193472)
- Bo Gao
- Ricardo Aguas
Wellcome
- Yoel Lubell
- Lisa J White
- Arjen M Dondorp
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Gao et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Determinants of MDA impact and designing MDAs towards malaria elimination
eLife 9:e51773.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51773
