In Malawi, young boys from about 5 to 15 are less likely than their family members to sleep with an insecticide-treated bed net designed to protect them from mosquitoes carrying the parasite that causes malaria.
In its evaluation study, Breakthrough ACTION found that exposure to the many layers of the campaign led to shifts in mindsets about sleeping under a mosquito net as a social norm, as well as changes in malaria-prevention behaviors.
CCP and Zambian health officials successfully engaged traditional leaders and worked with local radio stations to promote malaria-prevention behaviors, including indoor spraying for mosquitoes.
A new CCP study finds that eliminating malaria in Ghana would cost $961 million over the next decade, but would prevent 85.5 million cases, save 4,500 lives and avert $2.2 billion in health care expenditures. Finding the money to pay for that will be an enormous challenge.
Current interventions in place to protect people from malaria – most notably insecticide-treated mosquito nets and indoor spraying – work well, but new CCP research suggests that, in many places, more is needed to eliminate the threat.
Over the past five years, CCP has helped deliver 55 million insecticide-treated bed nets, initiated a game-changing new way to distribute them more efficiently and fundamentally altered the way that experts look at mosquito net access and use.
With most vulnerable covered, “now, we need to go even further to provide enough nets for everyone else” to protect them from malaria, says CCP’s Bolanle Olapeju.
“If you really want to eliminate malaria, you have to look at what’s causing the remaining malaria cases once you have good prevention tools in place,” says CCP’s April Monroe.
“The idea of replacing mass campaigns with yearly school net distributions was pretty revolutionary, frankly,” says CCP’s Hannah Koenker. “It hadn’t ever been tried on such a large scale.”
Videos released for World Malaria Day tell the stories of the people who CCP’s VectorWorks project and the Tanzanian government rely on to help them prevent malaria.
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