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Disruptions of malaria case management caused by the COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to an extra 76,000 malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, according to analysis by The Kids Research Institute Australia and Curtin University.

A world-leading research team built to tackle malaria has relocated from Oxford University to Western Australia to take advantage of the state’s growing big data talent pool.

Global efforts led by The Kids Research Institute Australia’s Child Health Analytics program will see nations impacted by high rates of malaria empowered to develop their own controls and solutions.

Research to eliminate one of the world’s deadliest diseases – malaria – will be accelerated thanks to a USD $4.7 million grant from the Gates Foundation for scientists at The Kids Research Institute Australia and The University of Western Australia (UWA).

In 2022, the World Health Organization extended their guidelines for perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) from infants to children up to 24 months old. However, evidence for PMC's public health impact is primarily limited to children under 15 months. Further research is needed to assess the public health impact and cost-effectiveness of PMC, and the added benefit of further age-expansion. We integrated an individual-based model of malaria with pharmacological models of drug action to address these questions for PMC and a proposed age-expanded schedule (referred as PMC+, for children 03-36 months).

Although the incidence of malaria is increased in women in endemic areas after delivery compared to non-pregnant women, no studies have assessed the benefit of presumptive antimalarial treatment given postpartum.

Testing and treating symptomatic malaria cases is crucial for case management, but it may also prevent future illness by reducing mean infection duration. Measuring the impact of effective treatment on burden and transmission via field studies or routine surveillance systems is difficult and potentially unethical. This project uses mathematical modeling to explore how increasing treatment of symptomatic cases impacts malaria prevalence and incidence. 

Geostatistical analysis of health data is increasingly used to model spatial variation in malaria prevalence, burden, and other metrics. Traditional inference methods for geostatistical modelling are notoriously computationally intensive, motivating the development of newer, approximate methods for geostatistical analysis or, more broadly, computational modelling of spatial processes.

To assess the pharmacokinetics, safety, and tolerability of two high-dose, short-course primaquine (PQ) regimens compared with standard care in children with Plasmodium vivax infections.

The antirelapse efficacy of primaquine is related to the total dose administered, whereas the risks of haemolysis and gastrointestinal intolerance are associated with the daily dose administered. National Malaria Control Programmes require local information on efficacy, tolerability and safety to optimize antimalarial treatment policies for Plasmodium vivax malaria control and elimination efforts.