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Since its inception in 2005, the US President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) has played a major role in the reductions in malaria morbidity and mortality observed across Africa. With the status of PMI funding and operations currently uncertain, we aimed to quantify the impact that a fully functioning PMI would have on malaria cases and deaths in Africa during 2025.
The implications of climate change for malaria eradication this century remain poorly resolved. Many studies focus on parasite and vector ecology in isolation, neglecting the interactions between climate, malaria control and the socioeconomic environment, including disruption from extreme weather. Here we integrate 25 years of African data on climate, malaria burden and control, socioeconomic factors, and extreme weather.
Studies reported the prevalence of herbal medicines used for various maternal conditions across regions in Tanzanian communities. However, the lack of a national estimate of herbal medicine use makes it challenging for policymakers, herbal medicine regulators, and healthcare practitioners to make informed decisions on herbal medicine-related policies and practices to optimize their contribution to maternal healthcare.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a significant cause of respiratory infections in young children. Since 2021, RSV has been a notifiable disease in Australia. However, current surveillance systems focus on hospitalised RSV, with limited surveillance at a community level through primary care clinics. This approach only captures RSV requiring hospitalisation. Less severe illnesses, while not captured, may have significant social and economic impacts including the associated cost of care and absenteeism. The aim of this study is to establish an understanding of the broader burden of RSV in young children in a community setting.
Differential exposure and effect of malaria results from blends of biophysical, geospatial, and social determinants of health (SDoH). Likewise, effective policies and programmatic interventions against malaria must consider the complex interaction of social and spatial factors, while comprehensive health promotion approaches must simultaneously tackle SDoH and the ecological dimensions that drive malaria.
Disease spreading models such as the ubiquitous SIS compartmental model and its numerous variants are widely used to understand and predict the behavior of a given epidemic or information diffusion process. A common approach to imbue more realism to the spreading process is to constrain simulations to a network structure, where connected nodes update their disease state based on pairwise interactions along the edges of their local neighborhood.
Monitoring the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital beds was a critical component of Australia's real-time surveillance strategy for the disease. From 2021 to 2023, we produced short-term forecasts of bed occupancy to support public health decision-making.
Cancer is a leading cause of death globally. Accurate cancer burden information is crucial for policy planning, but many countries do not have up-to-date cancer surveillance data. To inform global cancer-control efforts, we used the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2023 framework to generate and analyse estimates of cancer burden for 47 cancer types or groupings by age, sex, and 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2023, cancer burden attributable to selected risk factors from 1990 to 2023, and forecasted cancer burden up to 2050.
Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), or long COVID, are a public health concern. While most recover from SARS-CoV-2 infections within weeks, some experience persistent symptoms. Here, we quantified the association between repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections and the risk of hospital-diagnosed PASC.
Eradication and elimination strategies for lymphatic filariasis (LF) primarily rely on multiple rounds of annual mass drug administration (MDA), but also may benefit from vector control interventions conducted by malaria vector control programs. We aim to examine the overlap in LF prevalence and malaria vector control to identify potential gaps in program coverage.