topnaman | Malaria blog

Malaria articles on Karen Grepin’s blog – while only a few malaria dedicated blogs exist, some development and health blogs have a nice collection of posts including this one.
Assessment of malaria elimination in Zanzibar (old news) – even with a balanced outlook will it guide future actions – or are those predetermined by who’s paying [...]

The title of this paper could also be “How to write about malaria programs and operations”. It is among the most astute, careful descriptions of policy and long-term changes in malaria incidence I have seen. The article deserves broad reading as it contains many lessons on research and control for other countries.
In the past 20 years, Brazil not [...]

An anonymous emailer (many thanks) wrote to me to share news about a successful  microfinance program which improved malaria education. I was impressed with their work, and their efforts at rigorous evaluation.
Something bugged me though – the juxtaposition of microfinance and malaria appeared unnatural. Making microfinance available is a worthwhile initiative, but why do it [...]

About a year and a half ago I briefly discussed a WHO report (see comments here) claiming the success of scale-up of malaria control interventions. Now a group of CDC/ex-CDC scientists have published a superb commentary (Malaria Journal – open access) on the same evaluation and on using facility-based data more broadly (hat tip: Matt [...]

The Roll Back Malaria (RBM) coalition’s Global Malaria Action Plan was released against the backdrop of the world’s mover and shakers at the recent UN meeting. The Plan calls for a worldwide scale-up of key interventions with the goal of saving 4.2 million lives by 2015 and several other milestones beyond that date. Additionally, the [...]

About one month ago an interesting (and quite bold) article appeared in the British Medical Journal without much fanfare. Three faculty of the Swiss Tropical Institute wrote about why we should pursue a strategy of universal coverage with key interventions rather than an elimination plan. One name on the paper stood out to me – [...]

My friend Atanu Dey at Deeshaa.org often speaks of the fallacy of implementing technological solutions to overcome fundamentally non-technological problems. While Atanu usually invokes this paradigm in reference to India’s primary education challenge, I believe the same concept is relevant to public health efforts. Many public health problems today are non-technological, i.e. we have effective [...]

An estimated 250 million nets at $10 a piece are needed to achieve the current UN goal of 80% coverage in high risk groups – pregnant women and children under five. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon has raised the bar calling for universal coverage with nets by 2010 as part of his plan to [...]

When Melinda Gates ushered the eradication word at a meeting last October, she certainly took the malaria community by surprise. The New York Times examines the reaction to the Gates Foundation’s goal in which responses to eradication have ranged from “audacious” to “foolhardy”. Given the history of malaria eradication, many are skeptical. The previous attempt [...]

My goal for the blog is to achieve one post every day. Clearly, I’ve missed that mark, blogging while traveling is a trick which might take me some time to master. Until then, my apologies for any lapses in news and comments.
Last week Nature carried a commentary from Mark Grabowsky, malaria manager at the Global [...]