RFI: Malaria Management (9)
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Dear Colleagues
In a message dated 3/8/2006 8:43:33 AM Eastern Standard Time,
Bill Nesler <sdbc@hur.midco.net> recently pointed the list to
the following URL http://www.tr-ac-net.org/index.php
He had it absolutely right when he said the site "can be a lit-
tle cumbersome"... really the understatement of the year. Sorry
about that. As the site stands at the moment nobody will find
anything, except purely by accident.
The following URL points you to the "contents" of one of the ma-
laria series... it is not very elegant, but has some of the in-
formation that is relevant to malaria thinking:
http://www.tr-ac-net.org/DBadmin/DBtext01001.php?vv1=2&vv2=2&vv3=2
From this content page about 20 web pages of material about ma-
laria that is easily accessible... but it is not by any means
the latest iteration of the program planning.
When the site was first created, the pages were static... the
site is being reworked so that everything is driven from the da-
tabase... and is now quite seriously behind schedule. But while
the site appearance is way behind schedule, the database archi-
tecture is actually rather further advanced than it might have
been at this stage... and the integration of all sorts of cost
elements and value elements into a single comprehensive frame-
work is coming together quite well.
At this point in time, I believe the planning work that Bill
Nesler and others have done on the development of a Mosquito /
Malaria Control Program to suit Liberia is far better than what
is on the website... and will continue to get improved as feed-
back about the strategy is integrated into the plans. One thing
that is very clear is that cost effectiveness of the work can be
enhanced enormously as soon as there is very good data collec-
tion and operations are programmed around very current data
about operational effectiveness.
In terms of the overall program cost effectiveness... the key is
to stop malaria infection as rapidly as possible... and this
seems most likely to be a function of managing the mosquito kill
program so that new mosquito populations do not become reestab-
lished AND concurrently doing work to reduce the parasite in the
host human population AND to reduce mosquito access to infected
humans. I am sure scientists have done models of all these vari-
ables... but up to now I have not found one. This may be because
I do not know where to look, or it may be because one has not
been developed... and to the extent that one exists... I rather
doubt it will have the level of cost behavior detail that I want
to see.
Sincerely,
Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
Tel.: +1-212-772-6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
The Transparency and Accountability Network
http://tr-ac-net.blogspot.com
http://www.tr-ac-net.org