Oral Presentation First Malaria World Congress 2018

Entomological surveillance as a cornerstone of malaria elimination: a critical appraisal (#96)

Gerry F Killeen 1 2 , PP Chaki 1 , TE Reed 3 , CL Moyes 4 , NJ Govella 1
  1. Department of Environmental Health and Ecological Sciences, Ifakara Health Institute, Ifakara and Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania
  2. Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, United Kingdom
  3. School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University College Cork, Cork, Republic of Ireland
  4. Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Global capacity for developing new insecticides and vector control products, as well as mathematical models to evaluate their likely impact upon malaria transmission has greatly improved in recent years. Given that a range of new vector control products now emerging that target a greater diversity of adult mosquito behaviours, it should soon be feasible to effectively tackle a broader range of mosquito species and settings. However, the primary obstacles to further progress towards more effective malaria vector control are now paucities of routine programmatic entomological surveillance, and capacity for data processing, analysis and interpretation in endemic countries. Well-established entomological methods need to be more widely utilized for routine programmatic surveillance of vector behaviours and insecticide susceptibility, the effectiveness of vector control products and processes, and their impacts on mosquito populations. Such programmatic data may also be useful for simulation analyses of mosquito life histories, to identify opportunities for pre-emptively intervening early in the life cycle of mosquitoes, rather than targeting transmission events occurring when they are older. Current obstacles to more effective utilization, archiving and sharing of entomological data largely centre around global inequities of analytical capacity. These prohibitive and unfair imbalances can be addressed by reorienting funding schemes to emphasize south-centred collaborations focused on malaria-endemic countries.