Poster Presentation First Malaria World Congress 2018

An entomological surveillance planning tool to improve entomological intelligence for evidence-based vector control decision-making towards malaria elimination (#489)

Allison Tatarsky 1 , Yasmin A Williams 1 , Cara Smith Gueye 1 , Elodie Vajda 1 , Neil Lobo 2
  1. University of California, San Francisco, Global Health Group Malaria Elimination Initiative, San Francisco, CA, USA
  2. University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA

To accelerate progress towards malaria elimination, the WHO Global Technical Strategy 2016-2030 calls for maximizing the impact of vector control by strengthening entomological surveillance and capacity and managing insecticide resistance and residual transmission. In response to these efforts, we have developed a draft Entomological Surveillance Planning Tool (ESPT) to distil WHO guidance into an operational, decision-support tool for national malaria programs to support cost-effective, locally tailored, evidence-based vector control. The ESPT aims to support countries in generating entomological intelligence that guides vector control intervention selection, deployment in time and space, and provides a platform to evaluate complementary strategies and tools. To this end, the ESPT consists of a series of decision trees to help guide countries in the collection of the priority entomological indicators needed to make decisions through: 1) baseline surveys, 2) routine sentinel surveys, 3) focus investigations, and 4) entomological surveys based on priority programmatic questions. These decision trees link to minimums essential indicators, a trapping methodology matrix to guide collections, data collection forms, and guidance on selecting sites for entomological investigations. In collaboration with national malaria programs and local partners, pilots of the ESPT have begun in three countries. Parallel evaluation activities are underway and include: 1) qualitative assessments to measure the ESPT’s feasibility, acceptability, utility, and impact on vector control program decision-making; 2) costing of entomological surveillance activities and the cost per indicator; and 3) tracking decision-making on vector control strategy as related to implementation of the ESPT. Socialization of the draft ESPT and pilots of the tool is yielding feedback that will inform future iterations of the ESPT so that it is as useful as possible for national malaria programs for making vector control decisions that will support their efforts to get to zero.