Evaluation of the potential for rapid diagnostic testing for malaria within antenatal care to provide sustainable, dynamic and scalable malaria surveillance.

Many areas of the world lack precise and responsive estimates of malaria risk, which can be extremely heterogeneous over small spatial scales. This is particularly the case in most of Africa, where burden estimates are based upon infrequent population-based prevalence surveys and are too uncertain to tailor interventions effectively to the local level. As a continuous, programmatic source of prevalence data, routine screening for malaria within antenatal care (ANC), being adopted by an increasing number of countries, could provide much more granular estimates of transmission and burden. However, tools are needed to account for distinct patterns of detectability of infection in pregnancy and in the general population as transmission changes. Patrick Were will work with researchers in Kenya and Tanzania to quantify the relationship between infection observed in pregnant women attending ANC and transmission in the general population. Using state-of-the-art inferential techniques, Patrick Were will fit a mechanistic model of malaria transmission in the population and in pregnancy to these data. Working in close collaboration with researchers, implementing partners and policymakers this will generate evidence of the feasibility, utility and sustainability of ANC-based surveillance to evaluate and improve malaria control.

Diagnostics
Surveillance
Vulnerable Populations

Mar 2020 — Feb 2022

$128,219

Tanzania
United Kingdom