Speaker
Description
Malaria, a parasitic disease spread to humans via effective bite by an infectious adult female Anopheles mosquito, continues to exude a major burden in endemic areas (causing in excess of 600,000 deaths annually, mostly in children under the age of five). Much progress was made over the last two or three decades in the fight against malaria, largely due to the heavy and large-scale use of chemical insecticides (particularly in the form of long-lasting insecticidal nets and indoor residual spraying) to kill the malaria mosquito, promoting a renewed quest for malaria eradication. Unfortunately, such heavy use has also resulted in widespread Anopheles resistance to all the main chemical insecticides used in vector control, posing challenges to the eradication objective. New anti-malaria vaccines have been approved recently and are being deployed in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In this talk, I will present a new mathematical model, in the form of a system of delayed-differential equations, for assessing the population-level impact of one of the approved vaccines (R21/Matrix-M vaccine) in curtailing the disease burden in the targeted (vaccinated) population.
