Africa: Digitising Maps of Malaria Hotspots to Save Lives

By Munyaradzi Makoni

Cape Town — Munyaradzi Makoni reports on how a mapping collaboration between Europe and Africa has helped in tackling malaria.
Malaria is one of the world's biggest killers. In 2010, an estimated 660,000 people lost their lives to the disease - most of them children in Africa, where a child dies from malaria every minute. [1]
Until recently, however, it was difficult to access information about the locations of Africa's malarial hotspots or how they are influenced by the weather there. Information about the continent's malaria distribution was scattered across published and unpublished documents, often gathering dust in libraries.
But now, thanks to a digitised malaria mapping database that brings together all available malaria data, the disease no longer has the
'blind killer' status of past decades. MARA - Mapping Malaria Risk in Africa - was launched in 1996, with initial support of US$10,000 from the WHO's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases to map information on malaria prevalence across Africa. The project's first phase (1997-1998) aimed to produce an accurate atlas of malaria risk for Sub-Saharan Africa.
The project was set up as a pan-African enterprise, not owned by any specific organisation but coordinated by South Africa's Medical Research Council, in the spirit of open collaboration.
A group of scientists, based at institutions across Africa and Europe, worked together on the project. Further funding came from donors including Canada's International Development Research Centre, the Wellcome Trust, TDR and the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM), and the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. African institutions contributed through expertise, staff time and facilities.
Five regional centres - each using a standardised data collection system, were established across Africa. French-speaking West had an office in Bamako, Mali, while English-speaking West had a base in Navrongo, Ghana. Yaoundé, Cameroon hosted the Central Africa office; Nairobi, Kenya hosted the East Africa post and Durban in South Africa became home to the Southern Africa centre.
The project built expertise among local malaria control staff to enable them to reference the collected data, and it trained epidemiologists, medical doctors and researchers. In total it trained: 33 people to use GIS (geographic information systems) and databases, 23 to study climate change effects on the spread of the disease and 45 to interpret the results for people who might want to use them. Eight people got master's degrees and PhDs on malaria.
Malaria in bits and bytes
The mapping project tracked down information on malaria prevalence from both published and unpublished sources to identify malarial mosquito hotspots, disease prevalence and the weather conditions that fuel transmission.
The MARA database contains more than 13,000 malaria prevalence surveys collected over 12,000 locations: with 37 per cent in Southern Africa, 33 per cent in West Africa, 25 per cent in East Africa and five per cent in Central Africa. The data remains live but no new material is being added.
The project then disseminated this information to national and international policymakers, distributing 3,000 poster-sized malaria distribution maps to malaria control programmes, health departments and research institutions in malaria endemic countries.