Scientists are faced with challenges in the fight against malaria

Africa’s Malaria Elimination 8 Project: Approaching the Field in South Africa, Namibian, and Botswana with a Climate Data Set

Africa’s malaria modellers have many questions about how they can reach zero cases of the disease. Most of the field people are optimistic that it can be done, but they are looking at countries like South Africa and others on the fringes of Africa’s endemic malaria belt for inspiration. Some countries such as South Africa, Namibian, and Botswana are good testing grounds for elimination efforts. “If you can eliminate malaria in the low-burden countries,” she says, “it’s proof of concept that you can do it in the rest of Africa.”

Silal, Lennard and van Aardenne hope that their tool — which will start with malaria, but could expand to other diseases — will be useful in informing southern Africa’s path towards malaria elimination. Eight countries in the region, including South Africa, Mozambique and Botswana, have banded together under the banner Elimination 8 in an effort to eradicate the disease within their borders by 2030, says Silal. To build local expertise, MASHA is leading a project to train disease modellers across the region, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. “We’re not just developing a tool, we’re also developing a vibrant community of analysts around it,” she says.

The new tool is still in its infancy. A big part of the project will be reaching out to potential users — including both modellers and those who it is hoped will act on the predictions — to learn more about their needs. This process will be ongoing and will be different from a one-off approach, says Lisa van Aardenne, who is also at CSAG. Collaborations like this create better, more lasting, results. She says it’s useful, but is messy.

Adding climate data to the models will make them even more complicated, according to Chris Lennard who is a Climatologist at the CSAG. A data set can look like it contains the right information, at the right resolution, for a project, but in his experience, there might be caveats in the methodology that make the data entirely unsuitable. This creates a “huge potential” for error and is a potential waste of modelling money.

Patrick Martineau, who studies climate dynamics and its socio-economic impacts at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka, has not had such a wait. He used machine learning to develop a method of predicting the incidence of Malaria up to nine months in advance. The team’s model is based on sea surface temperatures in the Indian and Pacific oceans. This is a more reliable long-term predictor of the climatic patterns that drive malaria in the South African province than weather forecasts, which can’t project that far ahead. The method provides forecasts at the district level, two of which — Vhembe and Mopani, each covering around 20,000 square kilometres — are of particular interest because of their high risk of malaria.

Perspectives on Malaria in the 21st Century (I): The progress made by Ehime University, Medicines for Malaria Venture and Nagasaki University

We are very grateful to the financial support of Ehime University, Medicines for Malaria Venture and Nagasaki University. Funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the GHIT Fund, and Eiken Chemical helped make this Outlook. Nature retains sole responsibility for all editorial content.

There are positives to be found despite the obstacles. While progress is being made to find ways to prevent and treat this disease. The major advance of the past few years was the arrival of the first vaccine for malaria. In a few countries in Africa, children will be able to receive RTS,S. There is room for improvement. Some of the alternative vaccines target the parasites at different points in their life cycle. There are also vaccines needed against other species. Some researchers hope that monoclonal antibodies could offer another route to protection. Others, meanwhile, are taking aim at the mosquitoes that spread the parasites and exploring the possibility of suppressing or replacing mosquito populations using a gene drive — the ethics of which are hotly debated.