Improved assessment of mass drug administration and health district management performance to eliminate lymphatic filariasis

by Carmen Maroto-Camino, Pilar Hernandez-Pastor, Naomi Awaca, Lebon Safari, Janet Hemingway, Marilia Massangaie, Donald Whitson, Caroline Jeffery, Joseph J. Valadez Lymphatic filariasis (LF) elimination as a public health problem requires the interruption of transmission by administration of preventive mass drug administration (MDA) to the eligible population living in endemic districts. Suboptimal MDA coverage leads to persistent parasite transmission with c onsequential infection, disease and disability, and the need for continuing MDA rounds, requiring considerable investment. Routine coverage reports must be verified in each MDA implementation unit (IU) due to incorrect denominators and numerators used to calculate coverage estimates with administrat ive data. IU are usually the health districts. Coverage is verified so IU teams can evaluate their outreach and take appropriate action to improve performance. Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have conducted MDA campaigns for LF since 2009 and 2014, respectively. To verify distr ict reports and assess the declared achievement using administrative data of the minimum 80% coverage of eligible people (or 65% of the total population), both countries conducted rapid probability surveys using Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS)(n = 1102) in 2015 and 2016 in 58 IU in 49 district s. The surveys identified IU with suboptimal coverage, reasons for not residents did not take the medication, place where the medica...
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research