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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/133999
Quantifying primaquine effectiveness and improving adherence: a round table discussion of the APMEN Vivax Working Group
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The goal to eliminate malaria from the Asia-Pacific by 2030
will require the safe and widespread delivery of effective
radical cure of malaria. In October 2017, the Asia Pacific
Malaria Elimination Network Vivax Working Group met to discuss
the impediments to primaquine (PQ) radical cure, how these can
be overcome and the methodological difficulties in assessing
clinical effectiveness of radical cure. The salient discussions
of this meeting which involved 110 representatives from 18
partner countries and 21 institutional partner organizations are
reported. Context specific strategies to improve adherence are
needed to increase understanding and awareness of PQ within
affected communities; these must include education and health
promotion programs. Lessons learned from other disease programs
highlight that a package of approaches has the greatest
potential to change patient and prescriber habits, however
optimizing the components of this approach and quantifying their
effectiveness is challenging. In a trial setting, the reactivity
of participants results in patients altering their behaviour and
creates inherent bias. Although bias can be reduced by
integrating data collection into the routine health care and
surveillance systems, this comes at a cost of decreasing the
detection of clinical outcomes. Measuring adherence and the
factors that relate to it, also requires an in-depth
understanding of the context and the underlying sociocultural
logic that supports it. Reaching the elimination goal will
require innovative approaches to improve radical cure for vivax
malaria, as well as the methods to evaluate its effectiveness.
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BARDAJÍ, Azucena and APMEN Vivax Working Group. Quantifying primaquine effectiveness and improving adherence: a
round table discussion of the APMEN Vivax Working Group. Malaria Journal. 2018. Vol. 17, num. 241. ISSN 1475-2875. [consulted: 8 of October of 2026]. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/133999