News and notices. September 05, 2013

Coordinated threshold mapping can help improve efficiency when assessing prevalence of NTDs

Disease prevalence mapping allows countries to identify infected individuals and populations in need of diseasecontrol measures, such as mass drug administration (MDA) with preventive chemotherapy. For countries with unlimited time and resources, disease-specific prevalence mapping may be carried out in a slow, careful manner, by large teams of diagnostic technicians, supervisors, and drivers. These mapping protocols, established by the World Health Organization (WHO), are intended to be carried out independently, by each respective disease-control programme, in order to assess prevalence of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in individual populations. They work particularly well in areas endemic for one NTD.

In reality, the countries most affected by NTDs have limited resources for mapping, and are endemic for two or more NTDs, for example lymphatic filariasis (LF), and/or trachoma, and/or schistosomiasis and/or soil transmitted helminths (STH). For these countries, with efficiency and field-practicality in mind, the coordinated threshold mapping (CTM) method was developed.

Read more about the CTM method, “A coordinated approach to mapping neglected tropical diseases