Reveal takes aim at malaria parasite through mass drug administration campaigns in Southern Province, Zambia
Deep in Zambia’s Southern Province, in a town a three-hour drive away from the district’s largest city and economic hub (Siavonga), lies Manchamvwa Health Facility. This clinic serves as the focal point for the health needs of hundreds of people who live in the surrounding villages, and as such, is often overwhelmed with the many health needs of its patients. Malaria season in particular tends to put a great strain on the facility, with peak periods in previous years seeing anywhere from 100 to 200 cases per month.
Over the last couple of years, the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ), with the assistance of Akros and PATH’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Malaria Control and Elimination Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), have been working with the National Malaria Elimination Program district staff to overcome these numbers and improve the health of the local community by using geospatial technology to optimize indoor residual spraying (IRS) campaigns. Recently, the two organizations teamed up again to be the first to ever use Reveal’s spatial intelligence approach to maximize reach and ensure accountability in a mass drug administration (MDA) campaign that distributed antimalarials to the doorstep of each community member in three districts of Southern Province.
The recent history of malaria in Southern Province is one of resounding progress thus far. Due to its proximity to Lake Kariba’s glistening, still water, it is unfortunately a heavily malaria-burdened region by nature. But malaria in this region is highly seasonal, linked to the annual arrival of rainfall from December to April, leaving ample overgrowth and standing water—prime mosquito-breeding real estate. This seasonality provides an attractive window through which most interventions have taken aim. The result has been an impressive decrease in prevalence of malaria parasitaemia among children less than five years of age, from 15.5% in 2006, to 5.5% in 2010, and 0.0% in 2018.1,2 Trends like these make Southern Province appealing as a prime candidate for malaria elimination. However, despite overall improvement in the province’s malaria burden at large, districts directly adjacent to the lake are still at higher risk, as malaria cases have shown to be persistently high in some health facilities despite ongoing interventions.
To propel Southern Province closer to elimination, in 2014 MACEPA supported the national program with a malaria MDA research study in the Southern Province districts lining Lake Kariba, an area with an estimated population of 300,000 people. The rapid malaria reduction in the study area resulted in Zambia adding MDA to its arsenal of interventions in 2017. The country’s experience of malaria MDA—two rounds with one month in between doses—has shown it to be an effective intervention in areas with a strong foundation of vector control, case management, and surveillance. Recognizing that MDA campaigns are most effective when every household and individual in the targeted region are reached, MACEPA engaged Akros for its technical expertise in introducing Reveal as a novel approach to maximize the impact of MDA for malaria control and elimination in this area.