As the global health community comes together virtually for this year’s American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH ) Annual Meeting, it represents a key moment of reflection for Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programme. We’re looking back on almost two years of operating within the parameters of the pandemic while also looking forward into 2022 and beyond at what SMC could look like as an intervention as our latest research is integrated into practice .
Malaria Consortium set out early in the pandemic to adapt SMC delivery to ensure the intervention could be carried out safely in 2020 and reach its goal of distributing life-saving antimalarials to millions of children under 5. We produced new guidance for SMC implementers with a focus on infection prevention and control and underpinned this with a new job aid to support community distributors to follow the guidance.
While this period has been challenging for the programme, we have shared our learnings with the wider SMC community and worked with governments to embed changes to distributions. In a symposium at the ASTMH Annual Meeting, Dr Kevin Baker hosts a discussion on implementing SMC during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Abimbola Phillips presenting results from a mixed methods study in Nigeria to assess the quality of infection prevention and control measures practiced during the 2020 SMC campaign there.
Alongside the work of adaptation and the continuity of the programme, we have launched a new research strategy for SMC and advanced several other implementation and operational research projects during the past year to guide SMC implementation into the future. Results from these studies are also being presented at the ASTMH Annual Meeting.
Webinar: Taking seasonal malaria chemoprevention to new geographies
November 30th 2021, 1pm – 2.15pm GMT
Join us for a webinar on Taking seasonal malaria chemoprevention to new geographies, hear the latest research from Uganda and Mozambique and join the discussion on the future of SMC.
#FutureofSMC