topnaman | Malaria blog

This month’s issue of the Bulletin of the WHO brings a fantastic interview with Dr Newman, director of the organization’s malaria program. A very good line: At the centre of everything you have national malaria control programmes, which are much more sophisticated than 20 years ago.

NGrams are a neat Google feature which let’s you see the percentage of books in a year which mention a term of interest. Results for malaria in all the English language works they have cataloged between 1800 and 2008: Notice the major peaks corresponding to the ‘discovery’ period (1890-1920) and war/eradication era (1940-1960) for malaria [...]

Dr Jack Chow, a former WHO official with a colorful background including management consulting and investment banking, takes a bird’s eye view of the World Health Organization in Foreign Policy magazine. WHO cannot become complacent (see here) and needs to pursue serious reforms but my agreement with Dr Chow ends there. First, the “product” of [...]

Probably the largest, longest running, drug efficacy monitoring effort in the malaria world yet little appreciated and recognized. I hope our analysis and publication of thirty years of data (sorry, not open access – email me for the PDF) helps amend that. And something I do not say often enough: I am so grateful for [...]

Good sentences: Malaria can not be won by fighting from the meeting room. It is won by fighting in the frontline where decision, appropriate for the situation, is implemented with decisiveness. The key to malaria elimination is the frontline worker and its supervisor… Seeing the result of his work will motivate the front line workers [...]

The Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm, previously introduced here) may go down as one of the largest failures in public health history. Subsidizing effective antimalarials (namely artemisinin-combination therapies) for sale through private vendors (largely the wide-spread pharmacy/drug kiosk) is an untested idea for increasing access – yet is backed by more than $225 million [...]

It worked. Really well. Vivax malaria can relapse from liver stages (hypnozoites) adding to patient burden and further transmission. In tropical settings, upwards of 50-80% of patients may relapse within 1-3 months of the primary infection. Treating the dormant liver stages, which are unaffected by standard therapies, requires 14 days of treatment with primaquine. Adherence [...]

WWARN (previously introduced here) has released their interactive data viewer. It is fantastic to see and use. Viewing the tabulated data for any study (as opposed to just summary data) is a bit tricky: > click on the study icon on the map > look to the bottom left of the pop-up > click investigate [...]

ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) inaugurates a task force towards this end. I’ll just raise my eyebrow at this one. (Related, via the great TropIKA): Professor Chris Whitty, Head of Research for the UK Department for International Development, considers that malaria elimination is “most popular where it’s least attainable” and “most realistic [...]

We’ve talked about the looming threat of artemisinin-resistant malaria and its spread before (here and here). Well the Gates Foundation funded containment project for the P. falciparum strains along the Thai-Cambodia border has a blog. And it looks terrific – from vivid photos, an interview with Dr Wichai Satimai (director of the Thai Bureau of [...]