Conditions to eliminate cholera in Mozambique - the pathway for the development of the national cholera plan.

Cholera disproportionately affects the most vulnerable segments of the population, particularly those who have low or no access to basic water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Despite some improvements in WASH conditions, cholera still represents a persistent challenge in Mozambique, where outbreaks occur almost every year, with high case fatality rates, posing a threat to the country's economic development. The Government of Mozambique has started developing a revised National Cholera Plan (NCP), which aligns with "ending cholera-a global roadmap to 2030" launched by the Global Task Force on Cholera Control (GTFCC) in 2017. Ending cholera represents a critical step towards achieving the sustainable development goals and requires effective prevention and control interventions, ensuring that no one is left behind. The NCP must use a multi-sector approach and broad stakeholder collaboration with well-coordinated roles and functions of different partners to address major areas for cholera elimination - water and sanitation, health care services and management, epidemiology and surveillance, and health and hygiene promotion. Every cholera death is preventable. In this review, we reiterate the need for effective coordinated actions to control and eliminate cholera in Mozambique and decrease the cholera burden, enabling a healthy population over the generations.

An Expanded Transmission Assessment Survey to Confirm the Interruption of Lymphatic Filariasis Transmission in Wallis and Futuna.

Historically, the human prevalence of Wuchereria bancrofti infection in Wallis and Futuna (WAF) was among the highest in the Pacific and mass drug administration (MDA) against lymphatic filariasis (LF) either with diethylcarbamazine citrate (DEC) or the combination of DEC and albendazole had been implemented for decades. To determine whether LF antigen prevalence in WAF was lower than 1%, the infection threshold for elimination in an area where Aedes spp. are the principal vectors, we conducted the WHO-recommended transmission assessment survey in 2012. We present the results of a school-based survey, which targeted 1,014 students in all 13 elementary schools in WAF. From a fingerprick, the circulating filarial antigen (CFA) positivity was checked for grade 2-5 students using BinaxNOW filariasis test (immunochromatographic test). Of 935 children tested, three were positive for CFA in two schools. At the territory level, this was below the critical cutoff of nine cases, if the whole territory was considered as a single evaluation unit. The prevalence of CFA in WAF is less than 1%, reaching the goal for LF elimination set by the WHO. We were able to recommend stopping LF MDA and move to post-MDA surveillance to detect any recrudescence. This survey successfully paved the way for WAF to be validated as achieving LF elimination as a public health problem by 2020.

Monitoring health interventions--who's afraid of LQAS?

Lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) is used to evaluate health services. Subunits of a population (lots) are accepted or rejected according to the number of failures in a random sample (N) of a given lot. If failures are greater than decision value (d), we reject the lot and recommend corrective actions in the lot (i.e. intervention area); if they are equal to or less than d, we accept it. We used LQAS to monitor coverage during the last 3 days of a meningitis vaccination campaign in Niger. We selected one health area (lot) per day reporting the lowest administrative coverage in the previous 2 days. In the sampling plan we considered: N to be small enough to allow us to evaluate one lot per day, deciding to sample 16 individuals from the selected villages of each health area, using probability proportionate to population size; thresholds and d to vary according to administrative coverage reported; α ≤5% (meaning that, if we would have conducted the survey 100 times, we would have accepted the lot up to five times when real coverage was at an unacceptable level) and ß ≤20% (meaning that we would have rejected the lot up to 20 times, when real coverage was equal or above the satisfactory level). We classified all three lots as with the acceptable coverage. LQAS appeared to be a rapid, simple, and statistically sound method for in-process coverage assessment. We encourage colleagues in the field to consider using LQAS in complement with other monitoring techniques such as house-to-house monitoring.