Posted: May 15, 2020
New CWW publication provides deworming program with evidence to adjust Mass Drug Administration
Girija Sankar
A new paper1 published in the BMC Public Health shows that population-based disease mapping surveys such as the Integrated Community-Based Survey for Program Monitoring (ICSPM) can support monitoring for mature deworming programs that have delivered Soil-Transmitted Helminth (STH) interventions for five or more years. The paper resulted from Children Without Worms’ long-standing partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW), Bangladesh, to provide robust data to its Lymphatic Filariasis and STH Program to assess progress towards eliminating STH infections as a public health problem. After eight years of twice-annual mass drug administration (MDA) to school-aged children, the National Program surveyed four districts between August and October 2017 using ICSPM to determine the prevalence and intensity of STH. The ICSPM expands on the WHO’s guidelines for transmission assessment surveys for Lymphatic Filariasis (LF)2. The surveys revealed that the MDAs impacted STH prevalence in three of the four districts (3.4-5%), while it remained high in Sirajganj district (23.4-29.1%). As a result of these findings, the National Program is reviewing the frequency of MDA to adjust it in impacted areas and improve the quality and range of interventions in the persistent high-prevalence districts.
According to this paper, the ICSPM provides deworming programs with a new way to map STH (at baseline or impact).
Dr. Rubina Imtiaz, Director of Children Without Worms, and a co-author on this study said, “The study demonstrates that community-level parasitological data is necessary to understand the true impact of deworming interventions,” and that, ” the ICSPM provides National Programs with the kind of evidence needed to streamline resources to communities with high burden and scale back interventions in areas that have shown to have low burden.”
Since 2016, CWW has engaged with National STH Programs in Kenya and Sierra Leone to use the ICSPM for assessing progress in deworming interventions, as part of its broader strategy to build sustainable epidemiologic capacity for NTD program monitoring.
References:
1Davlin, S.L., Jones, A.H., Tahmina, S. et al. Soil-transmitted helminthiasis in four districts in Bangladesh: household cluster surveys of prevalence and intervention status. BMC Public Health 20, 672 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08755-w
Study images credit: Davlin, S..L., Jones, A.H., et al (2020)1; Creative Commons license
Banner image credit: A.S.M. Maruf Kabir for Children Without Worms