BACKGROUND The promotion of insecticide-treated net (ITN) can be a key approach towards the reduction of morbidity and mortality from malaria. OBJECTIVE To determine the proportion of mothers using insecticide treated nets for their children and reasons for nonuse. STUDY DESIGN Prospective hospital-based study. METHOD Consecutive mothers attending the children's out patient clinic of UNTH...

BACKGROUND Encouraging progress has been seen with reductions in Plasmodium falciparum malaria transmission in some parts of Africa. Reduced transmission might lead to increasing susceptibility to malaria among older children due to lower acquired immunity, and this has implications for ongoing control strategies. METHODS AND FINDINGS We conducted a longitudinal observational study of childre...

BACKGROUND Insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) provide a means to improve child survival across Africa. Sales figures of these nets and survey coverage data presented nationally mask inequities in populations at biological and economic risk, and do not allow for precision in the estimation of unmet commodity needs. We gathered subnational ITN coverage sample survey data from 40 malaria-endemic c...

BACKGROUND Several sub-Saharan African countries have rapidly scaled up the number of households that own insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs). Although the efficacy of ITNs in trials has been shown, evidence on their impact under routine conditions is limited to a few countries and the extent to which the scale-up of ITNs has improved population health remains uncertain. METHODS AND FIND...

For an automatic speech recognition system to produce sensibly formatted, readable output, the spoken-form token sequence produced by the core speech recognizer must be converted to a written-form string. This process is known as inverse text normalization (ITN). Here we present a mostly data-driven ITN system that leverages a set of simple rules and a few handcrafted grammars to cast ITN as a ...

We examined the relationship between insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs), malaria parasite infection, and severe anemia prevalence in children in Luangwa District, Zambia, an area with near-universal ITN coverage, at the end of the 2008 and 2010 malaria transmission seasons. Malaria parasite infection prevalence among children < 5 years old was 9.7% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 8.0-11.4...

This paper investigates whether the gravity model (GM) can explain the statistical properties of the International Trade Network (ITN). We fit data on international-trade flows with a GM specification using alternative fitting techniques and we employ GM estimates to build a weighted predicted ITN, whose topological properties are compared to observed ones. Furthermore, we propose an estimation...

In Sub Sahara Africa, the use of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) is one of many strategies of Roll Back Malaria (RBM) initiatives to reduce malaria burden. This study therefore assessed the current use of insecticide treated nets and the determinants of its use among the caregivers of under five children in an urban local government area in Osun state, Nigeria. The study utilised a cross-sectio...

BACKGROUND We investigated the efficacy, safety and cost of lime wash of household walls plus treatment of sand fly breeding places with bleach (i.e. environmental management or EM), insecticide impregnated durable wall lining (DWL), and bed net impregnation with slow release insecticide (ITN) for sand fly control in the Indian sub-continent. METHODS This multi-country cluster randomized cont...

Background: Malaria during pregnancy harms the baby's health. As personal protection and chemoprevention therapy, insecticide-treated nets (ITN) intermittent preventive treatment (IPTps) of malaria are recommended. According to World Health Organization, introduction IPTp ITN constituted a defining moment in prevention endemic areas pregnancy. The purpose this research was see if there an assoc...