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Transmission dynamics of vivax malaria in Korea: effectiveness of anti-malarial chemoprophylaxis

Background

Vivax malaria with two distinct (short- and long-term) incubation periods has been prevalent in the Republic of Korea since its re-emergence in 1993. Chemoprophylaxis has been conducted among military personnel since 1997. We estimated the time-dependent reproduction number, thereby assessing the protective effect of chemoprophylaxis.

Materials and methods

A mathematical model has been formulated using a renewal equation, estimating the yearly reproduction number (Ry) from 1993 to 2012 by maximum likelihood estimation method. We also computed Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) to test if there was a detectable change point in the trend in relation to chemoprophylaxis.

Results

Three-year average of Ry showed gradual decline through 1993-2012 with a temporary increase from 2003 to 2005, having been under the threshold 1 since 1998. AIC has suggested that the chemoprophylaxis has cut down Ry by 34% from what it would be without chemoprophylaxis.

Conclusions

The epidemic of vivax malaria in Korea has been brought under control due mainly to mass-chemoprophylaxis.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Endo, A., Nishiura, H. Transmission dynamics of vivax malaria in Korea: effectiveness of anti-malarial chemoprophylaxis. Malar J 13 (Suppl 1), P29 (2014). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/1475-2875-13-S1-P29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-13-S1-P29

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