Journal article
Surveillance to achieve malaria elimination in eastern Myanmar: a 7-year observational study
- Abstract:
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Background: The collection and utilization of surveillance data is essential in monitoring progress towards achieving malaria elimination, in the timely response to increases in malaria case numbers and in the assessment of programme functioning. This paper describes the surveillance activities used by the malaria elimination task force (METF) programme which operates in eastern Myanmar, and provides an analysis of data collected from weekly surveillance, case investigations, and monitoring and evaluation of programme performance.
Methods: This retrospective analysis was conducted using data collected from a network of 1250 malaria posts operational between 2014 and 2021. To investigate changes in data completeness, malaria post performance, malaria case numbers, and the demographic details of malaria cases, summary statistics were used to compare data collected over space and time.
Results: In the first 3 years of the METF programme, improvements in data transmission routes resulted in a 18.9% reduction in late reporting, allowing for near real-time analysis of data collected at the malaria posts. In 2020, travel restrictions were in place across Karen State in response to COVID-19, and from February 2021 the military coup in Myanmar resulted in widescale population displacement. However, over that period there has been no decline in malaria post attendance, and the majority of consultations continue to occur within 48 h of fever onset. Case investigations found that 43.8% of cases travelled away from their resident village in the 3 weeks prior to diagnosis and 36.3% reported never using a bed net whilst sleeping in their resident village, which increased to 72.2% when sleeping away from their resident village. Malaria post assessments performed in 82.3% of the METF malaria posts found malaria posts generally performed to a high standard.
Conclusions: Surveillance data collected by the METF programme demonstrate that despite significant changes in the context in which the programme operates, malaria posts have remained accessible and continue to provide early diagnosis and treatment contributing to an 89.3% decrease in Plasmodium falciparum incidence between 2014 and 2021.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12936-022-04175-w
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- Malaria Journal More from this journal
- Volume:
- 21
- Article number:
- 175
- Publication date:
- 2022-06-07
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-05
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1475-2875
- Pmid:
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35672747
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1263089
- Local pid:
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pubs:1263089
- Deposit date:
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2023-01-09
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Rae et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Notes:
- This research was funded in whole or in part by the Medical Research Council. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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