Selecting malaria interventions: A top-down approach

Malaria continues to be a great burden on both morbidity and mortality as well as economic development across the world. In highly endemic areas, such as Nigeria, malaria can claim hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars yearly. Typically, when selecting intervention strategies to control malaria, research is focused on the cost-effectiveness and general applicability of individual interventions. In separate studies, great care is taken to develop high-fidelity models of malaria’s economic and morbidity/mortality burden. In this paper, we take a top-down approach to selecting malaria intervention strategies. Instead of studying each element of the problem separately, we combine models for intervention cost-effectiveness, disease burden, and intervention delivery to create a single large-scale geographic optimization. We illustrate our top-down approach with a case study of malaria in Nigeria. Our optimization produces detailed geographic intervention plans, identifies key budget values and specifies the locations of the supply distribution centers.