Accelerating the Reduction of Malaria Transmission in Kanel, Ranérou and Linguère Districts

1. Introduction: During the last decade, 34 countries that have set the objective of freeing themselves from malaria, have obtained remarkable success in reducing the burden of the disease to very low levels that could represent a starting point to elimination programs leading to complete elimination. This remarkable success led several other countries to develop malaria elimination programs supported by the Global Malaria Action Plan of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership: "For a malaria-free world" which has for objective to eliminate malaria in at least 35 endemic countries by 2030. However, the transition from a strategy of malaria control toward a program centered on elimination has not yet been documented. PATH collaborates with the PNLP and regional and district health authorities to produce evidence that allows to make decisions on a model of reduction of malaria transmission in health posts. To that effect, a set of strategies will be put in place and evaluated to efficiently identify and eliminate malaria infections. Thus, zones freed from the disease will be documented. In Senegal, the epidemiological profile of malaria presents the conditions for disease elimination in the North and North-central areas of the country. Since 2012, the National Malaria control program, with support from PATH, has the objective of reducing Plasmodium falciparum transmission in several geographical areas of Saint-Louis, Matam and Louga regions.
2. Goal and Objective: The goal of the proposed work is to contribute to the national effort of malaria pre-elimination in Senegal, in line with the National Malaria control program's 2014-2018 strategic framework. The main objective is to strengthen the implementation of malaria case investigation in Linguère, Ranérou and Kanel districts, to evaluate operational aspects of scaling up the strategy and to evaluate the impact on malaria transmission to guide evidence-based decision-making.
3. Sites: The work will be conducted in six health posts in the regions of Matam (Kanel and Ranérou districts) and Louga (Linguère district), that have been chosen on the basis of the malaria incidence rate, the wide differences of transmission between villages in the health post catchment areas, their proximity and the availability of historical data from before 2014. Malaria elimination strategies were already implemented in the same health posts in 2015, thus this protocol aims to strengthen these activities. Seven health posts with similar characteristics were chosen as controls.
4. Study design A quasi-experimental study design will be used to evaluate the impact of the intervention. The incidence of malaria cases and the prevalence of parasitemia will be compared before and after the intervention and between the intervention and the control areas (difference-in-differences). Cross-sectional surveys will be conducted to estimate the parasitemia prevalence with RDT at the beginning and at the end of the high transmission season in intervention and in control areas.
5. Methodology Systematic malaria case investigation will be performed in all villages of the 6 intervention health posts. All malaria cases passively detected in a health post or in the community and confirmed with a positive rapid diagnostic test (RDT) will be considered an index case and will be investigated. A team (field worker and community health worker (DSDOM)) will visit the household of the index case and the 5 closest households (in a 100 m radius) and will test by RDT all the individuals living in the households. Any households with at least one positive RDT (including the index case) will receive a systematic focal drug administration (FDA) treatment with dihydro-artemisinin-piperaquine (DHA-PQ)
6. Duration:

The study is scheduled to last one year.(July 2015-June 2016).