Informed Decision Making

This week’s Fist Bump goes out to VectorLink Zambia for supporting the country’s National Malaria Elimination Program to use data to guide the IRS insecticide choice for the coming year.

During the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) of the Insecticide Resistance Monitoring & Management Plan meeting last week, VectorLink core partner PATH presented visualizations integrating 610 entomological data points across five partners for the period from 2000-2019. This was the first time that these datasets had been combined and viewed at the same time, and painted a comprehensive picture of insecticide resistance and species predominance across the country.

Using these visualizations, VectorLink worked with TAC members to determine a systematic way to use the available data to guide the 2020 IRS insecticide choice for each district. This exercise also resulted in a documented decision-making process that can be used and refined by the TAC in future years.

These efforts resulted in the TAC recommendation for the 2020 IRS insecticide choice, as well as a request from the TAC that this activity is continued. The TAC already has other ideas on how this newly-compiled data can be used to support malaria prevention efforts – and will soon use this data to identify gaps and inform insecticide resistance data collection for the coming year.

Congratulations VectorLink Zambia!