Malaria Consortium at ASTMH 2019

Malaria Consortium will be giving a number of presentations at the 68th Annual American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting this week. We will also be exhibiting at booth 419 during the conference so please come and join us to meet our experts, and learn more about our projects and research.

The annual meeting, held at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Centre in National Harbor, Maryland, is a five-day educational conference that brings together tropical medicine and global health professionals representing academia, government, non-profits, philanthropy, NGOs, industry, military and private practice. It runs from 20 to 24 November.

See below for a summary of our presentations and click here for the full schedule and locations, relevant publications and live content throughout the conference.

On Thursday, we will be hearing from Dr Sola Oresanya, our Country Technical Coordinator in Nigeria, on assessing quality of delivery of seasonal malaria chemoprevention using low literate community health workers in Nigeria. Our Dr Sylvia Meek Scholar, Takalani Makhanthisa, will also be presenting on the effectiveness of selected cattle-administered endectocides to reduce malaria-vector mosquitoes.

On Friday, our team from USAID’s Malaria Action Program for Districts will be presenting three posters: one poster on malaria morbidity and mortality trends in central Uganda, one on determinants of malaria testing at health facilities in Uganda and one on factors associated with severe malaria deaths with lessons from a mortality audit conducted in health facilities in Uganda. The following day, John Baptist Bwanika, our Malaria Specialist, will present his poster on maintaining universal coverage of long-lasting insecticidal nets through distributions in schools in Uganda.

Charlotte Ward, Senior Research Officer at Malaria Consortium, will give a presentation during the scientific session on Pneumonia, Respiratory Infections and Tuberculosis on results from the Breath Recognition Aid To Heath Experts (BREATHE) study, which assessed the reliability of using a video annotation tool to gain consensus on breathing rates.

On Sunday, Dr Kevin Baker, our Senior Research Specialist, will be hosting a symposium on improving pneumonia case management in children under five. He will also be presenting results from three acceptability studies in Ethiopia and Nepal conducted as part of our Acute Respiratory Infection Diagnostic Aids (ARIDA) project, which tested new frontline diagnostic tools.

Also on Sunday, Dr James Tibenderana, Malaria Consortium’s Technical Director, will be presenting on the evidence base and community knowledge, and how effective they can be when used together, as part of the symposium on Engaging High-Risk Communities to Accelerate Malaria Elimination.

Dr Sola Oresanya has her second presentation at the same time on Sunday: she will be sharing results on the feasibility of using community health workers in Nigeria to deliver severe acute malnutrition treatment using an innovative simplified low-literacy protocol.

We have a dedicated ASTMH section on our website providing a one-stop shop for all of the Malaria Consortium’s activities at the conference. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #TropMed19 and via Malaria Consortium’s Twitter feed, @FightingMalaria.