8:45 – 10:15 AM ET
1.1 - Moving Beyond ‘Business as Usual’ to Address Never Treatment in LF MDA
Over the past 2 years, there has been a renewed focus on understanding the role that individuals never treated during mass drug administration (MDA) might play in the elimination of lymphatic filariasis (LF). This session builds previous work carried out on never treatment and provides an update on progress made to address questions proposed during the 2021 COR-NTD session.
Never treatment (NT) has been defined as a self-reported indicator that someone has never swallowed LF treatment.
Research has interpreted the timespan of ‘never treatment’ differently – some report NT during any MDA rounds while other studies have indicated NT over 3-5 consecutive rounds. Early research from Haiti, Egypt and Samoa (Boyd et al 2010; El-Setouhy et al 2007; Coutts et al 2017) demonstrated that never treated individuals may also be mf-positive, potentially risking LF elimination goals.
The extent to which never treatment persists within an LF elimination program is not uniformly known and a concerted effort has been made to include a question on never treatment in routine programmatic monitoring and evaluation tools. A specific guide has been developed through the iCHORDS community of practice and is available for download with guidance on incorporating a question on never treatment into CES, SCT, pre-TAS and DQA.
Several countries have agreed to include this question within their M&E tools in 2022. Results from these experiences will be presented during this session by Act East and Act West collaborators.