Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have been awarded £2.8m to study factors sustaining malaria transmission in an area of India where infections are evading detection. The team will investigate malaria in the eastern tribal state of Odisha, where asymptomatic infections and those that cannot be spotted through microscopic examination help maintain a reservoir of this parasitic disease.
They will also evaluate biomarkers associated with malaria infections to inform the design and implementation of new interventions and diagnostic tools, furthering the goal of malaria elimination across India. Malaria in India has been declining since the early 2000s. Cases have gone down from 20 million in 2000 to 5.
6 million in 2019, according to the WHO World Malaria Report 2020. Despite this, the burden of malaria in Odisha has remained stubbornly high compared to other states in the country. In collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Community Welfare Society Hospital, LSHTM researchers and partners will carry out a community-based study of 3,000 people to investigate why malaria-causing Plasmodium infections persist across three districts of Odisha, each of which has a distinct ecology and malaria transmission settings.
The five-year project will focus on the prevalence and impact of submicroscopic and asymptomatic infections, understanding how infections are evading diagnosis, measuring human-to-mosquito transmission through.