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Artigo Original
In recent years, despite considerable advances in elimi-
nating malaria in countries in Asia, South America, and
Africa, this disease remains one of the largest public
health problems in tropical regions, prevailing in coun-
tries with weak health systems
1
. The significant in-
crease in investment over the last two decades has given
rise to the development of new tools and solutions to
control the parasitic disease with the greatest impact in
mankind.
The workshop on
Malaria Transmission: current
challenges and new tools in the elimination
context
was held at the Instituto de Higiene e Me-
dicina Tropical (IHMT)
(http://www.ihmt.unl.pt/workshop-malaria-transmission/) between the 30th
and 31st of October 2017, under the scientific project
of the Centre for Global Health and Tropical Medicine
(GHTM).
IHMT/ GHTM aimed at creating an in depth debate
over new challenges and innovative tools in the cur-
rent elimination context of malaria transmission in the
world, with the specific objectives:
1- Discuss current approaches to study malaria trans-
mission
2- Identify new tools to measure transmission in differ-
ent new settings of malaria, including pre-elimination
scenarios.
The organizing committee composed by researchers
from different backgrounds from biomedical sciences,
statistics to social sciences searched for a multidisci-
plinary environment to discuss new challenges and
innovative tools in the current elimination context of
malaria transmission, combining different scientific
backgrounds, tools, languages, and methodologies.
Therefore, we decided to plan this workshop with the
participation of top researchers from very diverse ar-
eas, working in several different settings.The diversity
of the audience (health professionals, social, biomedi-
cal and geographical science researchers, students) also
contributed to bring different points of view to bear
these challenges.
Specifically, this event aimed to explore the environ-
mental and social determinants in the new elimination
contexts, as well as current approaches and new tools
to measure malaria transmission and explore the effi-
cacy of control methods.
This workshop included five plenary sessions with dis-
tinguished speakers from various international institu-
tions.The topics were as follows:
•
Geospatial modelling of changing vector populations
by
Catherine Moyes, Malaria Atlas Project, Big Data Insti-
tute, University of Oxford, UK.
•
Current approaches and new tools to measure malaria
transmission
by Nuno Sepúlveda, Centro de Estatística
e Aplicações da Universidade de Lisboa and London
School of Hygiene andTropical Medicine, UK.
•
The economic challenges and benefits of eliminating ma-
laria
by Elisa Sicuri, ISGlobal, University of Barcelona,
Spain.
•
Impact of genetic and bio-ecological heterogeneities of mos-
quito vectors on Malaria transmission and control in Africa: fu-
ture perspectives in context of elimination and growing urbani-
zation
by Alessandra dela Torre, Dipartimento di Sanità
Pubblica & Malattie Infettive, University La SAPIENZA,
Roma, Italy.
•
Beyond 2020: Pushing the envelope of malaria elimina-
tion tools
by Rhoel R. Dinglasan, CDC South-eastern
Regional Center of Excellence for Vector Borne Dis-
eases, University of Florida, Emerging Pathogens Insti-
tute, USA.
First day
The opening session was chaired by the IHMT deputy
director M. R. Oliveira Martins.Afterwards, the work-
shop started with a general perspective on Geospatial
and Modelling tools. Firstly, with Catherine Moyes in a
talk entitled: “
Geospatial modelling of changing vector pop-
ulations
” [2] and divided into two parts.The first part fo-
cused on modelling spatial distribution and abundance
of mosquito vectors to incorporate them into spatial-
temporal analyses of malaria prevalence. The second
part highlighted studies on modelling spatial-temporal
patterns of insecticide resistance in malaria vectors to
investigate the relationship between this insecticide re-
sistance and residual variation in malaria transmission.
Most of these results were obtained within the frame of
the Malaria Atlas Project [3] and also IR Mapper [4].
Later, Nuno Sepúlveda presented an overview on “
Cur-
rent approaches and new tools to measure malaria transmis-
sion
” [2] where epidemiology, statistics, and genetics
were integrated. He pointed out the need of measur-
ing the residual malaria transmission intensity, giving
attention to the fact that the total number of official
cases excludes asymptomatic individuals. The role of
case exportation and the danger of malaria importation
were also described. Thus, the frequent underestima-
tion of malaria data is a concern to face. This talk ex-
plored the antibody-based estimates of malaria trans-
mission, such as seroprevalence and seroconversion
rate, that are gaining wide interest in order to quantify
the exposure of the population to malaria parasites in-
stead of presence of infection. This talk presented the
current concepts of a single-antigen serological analy-
sis to discuss how they can be used to inform malaria