ACREME Webinar 8 August 2024

“Mathematical assessment of the role of intervention programs for malaria control" with Maame Akua Korsah

With the several interventions currently available for malaria control, global statistics suggest a rise in malaria transmission. In the quest to understand the current transmission dynamics of malaria in response to interventions, Akua will present on a malaria control model, developed to assess the levels of interventions needed to eliminate malaria in an endemic setting.

“Stochastic modelling of human-to-mosquito transmission of Plasmodium Falciparum" with Xiao Sun

To achieve the goal of malaria elimination, we need a more accurate quantitative understanding of the life cycle of the disease, which has been greatly advanced by the introduction of mathematical modelling. The existing mathematical models are predominately based on deterministic dynamics and cannot capture stochastic phenomena such as the impact of low numbers of female and male gametocytes on increasing the uncertainty of the transmission probability significantly. Here we develop a stochastic human-to-mosquito transmission model, calibrated against membrane feeding assay data using Bayesian inference. We found that our model reproduces plausible outcomes of mosquito feeding assays with uncertainties. We identified the primary factors determining the transmission probability and further used the data-calibrated model to investigate the transmission probability of asymptomatic patients, aligning our findings with field studies across different transmission settings.

Recordings will be available on the ACREME website.