Saturday, 23 April 2005
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POST 00781E : MEASLES CAMPAIGN AND ITN DISTRIBUTION Follow-up on Posts 00763E, 00765E, 00767E, 00768E, 00771E, 00774E and 00778E 24 April 2005 _____________________________________ Two contribution to pursue this discussion. The first is from Gerhard Hesse (mailto:[email protected]) from France, followed by that of George Greer (mailto:[email protected]) from the United States _____________________________________ Dear All, I think the conclusion of the article by Mark Grabowsky and colleagues is self speaking:.....These findings suggest that linking bednet distribution to measles vaccination campaigns may provide an important oppportunity for achieving high and equitable coverage of bednets. During the Measles Partnership meeting in February in Washington the RBM Partnership participated for the first time officially, and now with the coming RBM Board meeting a representative of the Measles Partnership will attend this meeting. To be honest and coming from the Malaria side, I must admit that we are in most cases far away from achieving the coverage which seems to be routine for the "vaccination" people. And what convinced me, coming from the private sector where we are looking obviously more for synergies than sometimes the public sector seems to do, are in fact the synergies. One result from the recent Togo campaign shows that very clear: 50% of the women asked why they came to the vaccinations of their childs, said because bednets are freely distributed. From my point of view I think we cannot allow ourselves to miss one chance to get ITNs into the field to the vulnerable groups (another synergy - the target group children < 5). Only coverage makes the difference in ITN from being converted from a personal protection tool into a vector control tool. Pierre Guillet from WHO/AFRO told us once that already 25% coverage can be seen having an impact on malaria, but we are looking for 60% - and in most cases we are still far away from the 25%. Best wishes for a nice weekend to everybody. Best regards / meilleures salutations / mit freundlichen Gruessen Gerhard Dr. Gerhard Hesse, Bayer Environmental Science S.A.S. Business Manager Vector Control, Lyon, France ---------------------------------- Jean and others, This is a very interesting, and for me timely, discussion. In East Timor, BASICS is working with the Ministry of Health and various NGOs to achieve rapid delivery of ITNs to children under 5. This will be in addition to an on-going program headed by Health Net International that has achieved high coverage of pregnant women through routine delivery at ANC visits. The HNI program will have reached all districts of the country later this year. The combined effect of these two approaches seems very similar to the Red Cross implementation in Togo, where delivery through the measles campaign is paired with routine distribution through ANC distribution. One point of difference is that the community-based delivery of ITNs to families with children under 5 in East Timor will not be linked to delivery of other interventions. Developing the approaches for the community-based distribution is in a formative stage. The partners (MoH, NGOs, GF and BASICS) will jointly develop the common principals for the intervention. At a minimum this will include use of common BCC approaches and materials, systems to ensure accountability for delivery of ITNs, process indicators to measure program execution and outcome indicators to measure levels of children under 5 sleeping under ITNs. After developing a proposal that meets the standards set by the group, NGOs will be supported through BASICS to implement community-based distribution. I know of no other large-scale, free-standing community-based distribution of ITN, i.e. not linked to an existing infrastructure/activity such as measles campaigns. Our approach will almost certainly be more expensive than those that are linked to campaigns and is unlikely to become a model to reach larger populations (East Timor's population is less than 1 million). It will, however, provide a look at a an approach that links a sustainable, routine delivery of ITNs into the population (through ANC visits) with a one time effort to rapidly reach high coverage for children under 5. We would be interested inputs, advice and materials used in other large scale ITN distributions, both those that were linked with immunization campaigns and those that were not. Also, of interest would be experience/insights on how to minimize the effects of the mass distributions on the on-going routine delivery through ANC visits. Thanks in advance, George Greer George Greer, Ph.D. Malaria Technical Officer, BASICS Project, Arlington, VA, USA ______________________________________________________________________________ Visit the TECHNET21 Website at http://www.technet21.org You will find instructions to subscribe, a direct access to archives, links to reference documents and other features. ______________________________________________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message to : mailto:[email protected] Leave the subject area BLANK In the message body, write unsubscribe TECHNET21E ______________________________________________________________________________ The World Health Organization and UNICEF support TechNet21. The TechNet21 e-Forum is a communication/information tool for generation of ideas on how to improve immunization services. 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