Hélène Hiwat

Hélène Hiwat is the coordinator of the national Malaria Program in Suriname, South America. She did her Master study in biology at the Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Following that, in 1997, she was offered a position at the National Zoological Collection in Suriname as a curator of the Invertebrate Department. In this position she engaged in entomological biodiversity research in the Amazon rainforest. 

In 2005 the Ministry of Health in Suriname had a need of someone to set up and coordinate malaria mosquito research for the first Global Fund funded malaria project in Suriname. Having no knowledge of, or experience with malaria mosquitoes Hélène made the decision to accept the position on the condition that she was allowed to do the research within a PhD framework. She linked back to the Wageningen University and obtained her PhD degree.  In the same period until 2017, Hélène managed the Entomology Department of the Bureau of Public Health in Suriname, coordinating capacity building, research and surveillance on Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes, Phlebotominae and Triatominae. 

In 2015 Hélène was asked to take over management of the national Malaria Program. The Malaria Program in Suriname is special in that, while working with partners toward national malaria elimination in all the conventional ways, the program itself has a focus on developing targeted and innovative approaches to providing malaria services to the high-risk cross-border moving migrant populations. The mobile populations are for a large part engaged in illegal goldmining in the remote forest areas. Targeted interventions are important in this context because their mobility makes them drivers for malaria transmission in the Amazonian region. This in turn poses a continuous threat to the malaria elimination goal of Suriname (risk of re-introduction of malaria and of emergence of drug resistance parasites because of undiagnosed self-treatment with black market medication).

Currently, the Malaria Program, under management of Dr. Hiwat, is providing low-threshold integrated health services for malaria, HIV, leprosy, leishmaniasis, and since 2020 also for Covid-19, at central level and in the remote gold mining sites in Suriname.