Predicting the public health impact of a malaria transmission-blocking vaccine
Loading...
Date
2021-03-08
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Nature Communications
Abstract
Transmission-blocking vaccines that interrupt malaria transmission from humans to mosquitoes are being tested in early clinical trials. The activity of such a vaccine is commonly
evaluated using membrane-feeding assays. Understanding the field efficacy of such a vaccine
requires knowledge of how heavily infected wild, naturally blood-fed mosquitoes are, as this
indicates how difficult it will be to block transmission. Here we use data on naturally infected
mosquitoes collected in Burkina Faso to translate the laboratory-estimated activity into an
estimated activity in the field. A transmission dynamics model is then utilised to predict a
transmission-blocking vaccine’s public health impact alongside existing interventions. The
model suggests that school-aged children are an attractive population to target for vaccination. Benefits of vaccination are distributed across the population, averting the greatest
number of cases in younger children. Utilising a transmission-blocking vaccine alongside
existing interventions could have a substantial impact against malaria
Description
Keywords
Computational models, Epidemiology, Malaria, Vaccines, Burkina Faso, Université Nazi Boni, CEA-ITECH_MTV, ACE: Bio-technological Innovation for the Elimination of Vector- Borne Diseases, R. Serge Yerbanga, Thierry Lefèvre