Seasonal malaria chemoprevention: OPT-SMC project

Seasonal malaria chemoprevention: OPT-SMC project

Toby Madden
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Overview

Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) involves monthly administration of the antimalarials sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine and amodiaquine to all children aged under six years during the malaria season. Following a 2012 WHO recommendation, 13 sub-Saharan African countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo) with high seasonal malaria transmission have adopted and integrated SMC into their policy documents and strategic plans. 

The total number of children who received SMC in 2019 (at least one treatment) was estimated to be 22 million. SMC has been shown to substantially reduce the number of cases and deaths due to malaria, however, although countries have been quick to adopt SMC, fewer than 50% of eligible children had access to SMC in 2019. The delivery of SMC must be optimized in order to close this gap.

The OPT-SMC project aims to optimize delivery by strengthening the capacity of national programmes to conduct implementation research, to adapt SMC to the local context and to improve its delivery and impact.

In addition, little is known about the risk of drug-resistant parasites spreading while implementing SMC on a large scale. TDR is supporting the University of Thies and the national malaria programme in Senegal to investigate which cost-effective strategy options could be made available to national malaria programmes to monitor drug sensitivity.

In this context, safety monitoring remains a challenge. TDR supported countries to evaluate the feasibility of implementing innovative strategies to improve safety monitoring. The results of this evaluation can be found in the paper entitled "Evaluation of Two Strategies for Community-Based Safety Monitoring during Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention Campaigns in Senegal, Compared with the National Spontaneous Reporting System ".