School and community-based student-driven dengue vector control and monitoring in Myanmar: A cluster randomized controlled trial.
Dengue is the most common and widespread mosquito-borne arboviral disease globally, causing >390 million infections and >20,000 deaths annually. There are no effective vaccines, preventive drugs or treatments. Therefore, current efforts to reduce dengue transmission rely primarily on mosquito vector control. Although most vector control methods used by national dengue control programs may temporarily reduce mosquito populations, there is little evidence that they affect transmission. There is a compelling need for innovative, effective and locally adapted approaches for sustainable vector control and monitoring, to which school children can be particularly relevant contributors. Schools have been engaged in national dengue control programs in several countries and school-based vector control research projects have been associated with better dengue knowledge uptake and contributed to improved school and community-based vector control activities.
Hence, in this project, we aim to involve middle school students and encourage them to become actors in dengue knowledge transfer to their communities and lead the delivery of vector control interventions and monitoring methods. Following this rationale, we believe that students can become pilots of decentralized vector surveillance and agents of sustainable disease control in line with recent new paradigms in integrated vector surveillance and control. This provides an opportunity to operationalize transdisciplinary research towards sustainable health development.
The MY-SCHOOOL project aims to improve knowledge of dengue and vector control in students and their parents by facilitating improved teaching capabilities by training of teachers and optimizing the dengue school curriculum thereby inducing active student involvement in community vector control and monitoring.
The project aims to improve knowledge of dengue and vector control in students and their parents by inducing active student involvement in community vector control and monitoring and to facilitate improved teaching capabilities by training of teachers and optimizing the general public health curriculum. This will contribute to the long-term project objective to reduce dengue transmission and exposure to dengue risk factors in Myanmar.
Main project objective: Carry out a randomized controlled trial to reduce dengue transmission and risk factors through school- and community-based educational and vector control interventions.
Specific objectives:
June 2020Currently Myanmar is in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with school closures, restrictions on travel, meetings and gatherings, etc. This will result in modifications of the project. We have proposed a new plan to the donor and requested for a project change, which will not largely affect the project objectives. As the project is more than a randomized controlled trial, the new situation offers strengthened opportunities to improve stakeholder capacity consistent with the overall long-term project aims. The curtailment of travel and limited on-site activity opens time for a deeper reflection of project assumptions and problem framing, building team and stakeholder capacity, and producing theoretical research outputs. This will improve understanding of the underlying factors that may affect trial results and will involve integrating findings from other projects of the consortium members and publications previously unavailable.
Hans J. Overgaard, medisinsk entomolog og forsker ved REALTEK, har nok en gang klart å få et prosjekt bevilget fra Forskningsrådets program på Global helse og vaksinasjonsforskning (GLOBVAC).
Fiona Vande Velde, Johanne Longva, Hans J. Overgaard, Sheri Lee Bastien. 2020. Identifying nudge interventions for behavior-based prevention and control of neglected tropical diseases: a scoping review protocol. JBI Evidence Synthesis. In press.
Ministry of Health and Sports, Myanmar
Malaria Consortium
Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit/ University of Oxford
Global Health Group International
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