1,721,005 research outputs found
Measurement of malaria transmission and impact of malaria control interventions using health facility and community-based routine reporting systems
No full textGlobally malaria still remains the most important parasitic disease of public health interest. In the recent past, most endemic countries have deployed and scaled up both preventive and curative interventions to reduce malaria transmission and, ideally, eliminate it. This has lead to global reductions in both mortality and incidence of malaria. These declines have been attributed to the reinvigoration of the global malaria control agenda by the explicit ambition of achieving elimination, which has lead to an increase in funding for national control programmes to increase coverage of preventive interventions, field compatible diagnostic tools for confirming parasite infection, and increased access to effective treatment. As a result of declines in malaria transmission, the focal nature of malaria transmission has become much more evident and has lead to consideration of surveillance as a key intervention for malaria control/elimination in its own right.
Surveillance systems have been well established in most formal health facilities but the incorporation of these systems at community level and operationalised by community health workers (CHWs) still remains limited. Additionally, these few examples of CHW-implemented surveillance systems have been typically only reporting indicators of malaria infection burden, without capturing indicators of intervention availability, deployment, coverage and utilisation, thus representing a missed opportunity for routine monitoring and evaluation of impact of interventions in “real time” to inform program planning and implementation.
The study was established as part of a multi-country study under the Malaria Transmission Consortium Project whose primary objective was to develop and evaluate new or improved methods for measuring malaria transmission. Thus the overall goal of this study was to demonstrate how malaria transmission, and impact of interventions, could be routinely measured through a novel longitudinal community based surveillance system (CBSS) operationalised by modestly paid CHWs.
The CBSS included both passive and active surveillance activities using field – compatible test kits for in situ parasitological detection of malaria infections, based on which confirmed cases were treated with anti-malarial drugs, coupled with a detailed questionnaire on access and use of malaria control interventions and population characteristics. Passive surveillance was achieved conventionally whenever community members self-reported to the CHWs and active surveillance was achieved through monthly active visits to all households in their catchment populations to offer testing and treatment. In addition to recording detailed details of each patient contact in a paper patient register, weekly summaries of selected data elements were submitted by the CHWs using a mobile phone platform via short messaging system (SMS). The detailed reference data recorded in the patient register was then used to monitor malaria infection dynamics in the study population, evaluate the impact of preventative measures, such as indoor residual spraying (IRS) and long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and validate the electronic summaries submitted via SMS.
Overall, the CBSS did not routinely capture all malaria infections in the study population and was insufficient to eliminate the human parasite reservoir. This was primarily due to limited study participant participation with the monthly active testing and treatment offered by the CHWs. However, the CBSS clearly demonstrated the incremental and residual impact to supplementation of pyrethroid-treated LLINs with non - pyrethroid insecticides applied by IRS in areas where the dominant malaria vector is highly resistant to pyrethroids. The adequacy of the SMS reports submitted by the CHWs confirms the great potential of mobile phone technology for facilitating and improving the effectiveness of community based reporting. Despite its limitations, the CBSS successfully provided programmatically relevant information regarding malaria infection dynamics across the large study area at a very affordable cost. The CHWs demonstrated their ability to not only provide treatment services but also adequately report their findings both electronically and on paper. CHWs are primarily tasked with providing routine health services at community level but clearly also have a valuable auxiliary role to play in “real time” surveillance of malaria, and most probably a range of other diseases. If the full potential of CHWs as agents of health surveillance can be realized, control programme progress can be measured through spatial and temporal mapping of transmission with greater sensitivity and at finer scales than is possible with health facilities alone, to enable improved, better-informed program planning, resource allocation and implementation
Am J Trop Med Hyg
Get PDFWe examined the relationship between insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs), malaria parasite infection, and severe anemia prevalence in children in Luangwa District, Zambia, an area with near-universal ITN coverage, at the end of the 2008 and 2010 malaria transmission seasons. Malaria parasite infection prevalence among children < 5 years old was 9.7% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 8.0-11.4%) over both survey years. Prevalence of severe anemia among children 6-59 months old was 6.9% (95% CI = 5.4-8.5%) over both survey years. Within this context of near-universal ITN coverage, we were unable to detect a significant association between malaria parasite or severe anemia prevalence and ITNs (possession and use). In addition to maintaining universal ITN coverage, it will be essential for the malaria control program to achieve high ITN use and laboratory diagnosis and treatment of all fevers among all age groups to further reduce the malaria burden in this area.1R18CK000102-01/CK/NCEZID CDC HHS/United State
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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