Background Prompt and effective case detection and treatment are vital components of the malaria case management strategy as malaria-endemic countries implement the testing, treating and tracking policy. The implementation of this policy in public and formal private sectors continue to receive great attention while the informal private retail sector (mostly the patent and propriety medicine ven...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, malaria remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality among children under 5, due to lack of access to prompt and appropriate diagnosis and treatment. Many countries have scaled-up community health workers (CHWs) as a strategy towards improving access. The present study was a cost-effectiveness analysis of the introduction of malaria rapid diagnostic tests (mRDTs) perf...

No evidence-based information exists to guide clinicians for giving presumptive treatment to returning travelers when malaria is strongly suspected on clinical grounds but laboratory confirmation is not immediately available or is negative. A prospective study was conducted in travelers or migrants who sought care for fever to identify clinical and laboratory predictors of Plasmodium parasitemi...

Malaria treatment policy has changed from presumptive treatment to targeted "test and treat" (T&T) with malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) and artemisinin combination therapy (ACT). This transition involves changing behavior among health providers, meaning delays between introduction and full implementation are recorded in almost every instance. We investigated factors affecting successful t...

INTRODUCTION Bacterial etiologies of non-malaria febrile illnesses have significantly become important due to high mortality and morbidity, particularly in children. Despite their importance, there are few reports on the epidemiology of these diseases in Tanzania, and the true burden of such illnesses remains unknown. This study aimed to identify the prevalence of leptospirosis, brucellosis, ty...

Mass campaigns with antimalarial drugs are potentially a powerful tool for local elimination of malaria, yet current diagnostic technologies are insufficiently sensitive to identify all individuals who harbor infections. At the same time, overtreatment of uninfected individuals increases the risk of accelerating emergence of drug resistance and losing community acceptance. Local heterogeneity i...

The revised W.H.O. guidelines for malaria management in endemic that treatment should be reserved to laboratory confirmed cases, both for adults and children. Currently the most widely used tools are rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs), that are accurate and reliable in diagnosing malaria infection. Howev and RDTs may give positive results in febrile patients who have another cause of fever. Excessiv...

OBJECTIVES This study characterizes the variations in malaria morbidity for Accra. METHODS Both routine reporting of presumptive, clinically diagnosed malaria in out-patient clinics and results from a longitudinal household survey are used in the analysis. In the household survey, cases of suspected malaria were self-reported by patients, based on diagnoses from health centers, hospitals, pha...