The theme of this year’s World Malaria Day (marked on 25 April) is ‘Driven to end malaria’. One way that scientists and health workers are doing this is by giving anti-malarial drugs (medicines that kill the malaria parasites) to healthy young children during the malaria ‘high season’ - before they actually get sick from malaria. Every year, 50 million children in Africa are treated with this seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
This is a really practical intervention: it uses relatively cheap medicines, and it targets the most vulnerable group – young children - at times of the year when their risk of getting malaria is highest. Crucially, health workers give these medicines directly to children in their communities - parents don’t to travel to health centres to get these life-saving medications, an important consideration in many rural parts of world, where health centres are a long way away and difficult and expensive to get to.
Making things better
At the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory at Oxford University, they are working to make this malaria preventative treatment even better. They do this effectively and cheaply by bringing together data from multiple studies, then analysing it to produce robust scientific evidence that health policy makers can actually use.
As part of his DPhil, Dhruv Darji (Nuffield Department of Medicine and Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO)) is evaluating what combinations of antimalarial drugs, including combinations with malaria vaccines, work best for this kind of preventative malaria medication. Normally, you might figure this with a clinical trial where we test out all of these combinations to find out which ones work best. But clinical trials are expensive, even more so in a resource-limited settings in Africa, and the few clinical studies that do exist aren’t enough to provide a comprehensive answer.
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.