Authors

H C Turner¹; J E Truscott¹; R M Anderson¹;  ¹ London Centre for Neglected Tropical Disease Research

Discussion

The current aim of the World Health Organisation is to eliminate soil-transmitted helminths (STH) as a health problem in children. To this end, the goal is to increase anthelmintic treatment coverage to reach 75% of pre-school aged and school aged children by 2020 in endemic countries. However, recently there has been an increased interest in changing the goal to breaking the transmission of STH - which may require a change in strategy.

We employ a deterministic fully age-structured model of STH transmission and preventive chemotherapy to examine the changes in worm burden in response to the projected coverage trends up to 2020 and beyond. We also consider the impact of alternative strategies &hypen; such as expanding to community-wide treatment or using ivermectin co-administration for Trichuris, and compare the feasibility of breaking transmission.