Difficulties in organizing first indoor spray programme against malaria in Angola under the President's Malaria Initiative

PROBLEM: Successful attempts to control malaria require understanding of its complex transmission patterns. Unfortunately malaria transmission in Africa is often assessed using routine administrative reports from local health units, which are plagued by sporadic reporting failures. In addition, the lack of microscopic analyses of blood slides in these units introduces the effects of many confounding diseases. APPROACH: The danger of using administrative reports was illustrated in Angola, the first country in which malaria control was attempted under the President's Malaria Initiative, a development programme of the Government of the United States of America. LOCAL SETTING: Each local health unit submitted monthly reports indicating the number of suspected malaria cases to their municipality. The identification of the disease was based on clinical diagnoses, without microscopic examination of blood slides. The municipal and provincial reports were then passed on to the national headquarters, with sporadic reporting lapses at all levels. RELEVANT CHANGES: After the control effort was completed, the defective municipal reports were corrected by summarizing only the data from those health units which had submitted reports for every month during the evaluation period. LESSONS LEARNED: The corrected data, supplemented by additional observations on rainfall and mosquito habitats, indicated that there had probably been no malaria transmission before starting the control operations. Thus the expensive malaria control effort had been wasted. It is unfortunate that WHO is also trying to plan and evaluate its malaria control efforts based on these same kinds of inadequate administrative reports

To assess whether indoor residual spraying can provide additional protection against clinical malaria over current best practice of long-lasting insecticidal mosquito nets in The Gambia: study protocol for a two-armed cluster-randomised study

Background: Recently, there has been mounting interest in scaling-up vector control against malaria in Africa. It needs to be determined if indoor residual spraying (IRS with DDT) will provide significant marginal protection against malaria over current best practice of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and prompt treatment in a controlled trial, given that DDT is currently the most persistent insecticide for IRS. Methods: A 2 armed cluster-randomised controlled trial will be conducted to assess whether DDT IRS and LLINs combined provide better protection against clinical malaria in children than LLINs alone in rural Gambia. Each cluster will be a village, or a group of small adjacent villages; all clusters will receive LLINs and half will receive IRS in addition. Study children, aged 6 months to 13 years, will be enrolled from all clusters and followed for clinical malaria using passive case detection to estimate malaria incidence for 2 malaria transmission seasons in 2010 and 2011. This will be the primary endpoint. Exposure to malaria parasites will be assessed using light and exit traps followed by detection of Anopheles gambiae species and sporozoite infection. Study children will be surveyed at the end of each transmission season to estimate the prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum infection and the prevalence of anaemia. Discussion: Practical issues concerning intervention implementation, as well as the potential benefits and risks of the study, are discussed. Trial Registration: ISRCTN01738840 - Spraying And Nets Towards malaria Elimination (SANTE