Boosting the Impact of SMC Through Simultaneous Screening and Treatment of Roommates

Malaria represents a major public health concern in sub-Sahara Africa. Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) is one of the largest preventive measures. It consists to administer Amodiaquine+Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine to children aged 3-59 months on a monthly basis during the peak malaria transmission season. Despite its implementation, the burden of malaria is still very high in children under five years old in Burkina Faso. This raises questions about other hidden factors that can negatively affect the effectiveness of SMC intervention. Huge effort aiming at preventing human-vector contact were deployed such as the large-scale distribution of insecticide treated bed nets. Healthy humans are only infected via mosquitos if there are parasites reservoir around. Yet, there is no strategy aiming at protecting healthy humans from parasites reservoir. Under these circumstances, multiples humans sharing the same habitat could continually entertain the transmission cycle despite adequate existing measures. This would obviously jeopardize the expected impact of the SMC and the global effort to control the disease. In such context, we postulate that screening and treating malaria SMC-children's roommates could greatly improve the impact of SMC intervention and reduce malaria transmission in endemic settings. The goal of our study is to improve the impact of SMC intervention in terms of reducing malaria morbidity and mortality in children under five years. Primary objectives include assessing whether SMC + children's roommates screening and treatment with Dihydro-artemisinin-piperaquine (DHAPPQ) is more effective than current routine implementation of SMC alone as well as the assessment of the tolerance and safety of AQSP and DHAPPQ. Secondary objectives include the assessment of the impact of the new strategy on the circulating parasite population in terms of selection of resistant strains and the assessment of determinants such as adherence and acceptability of the strategy