MONITORING THE CONTROL OF HUMAN SOIL-TRANSMITTED HELMINTHIASIS: ARE WE READY?

Given the worldwide upscale of mass drug administration programmes, there is need for a monitoring system that allows programme managers, policy-makers and donors of the drugs to assess whether the objectives are being met and, if necessary, to correct the implementation strategy. However, mass drug administration programmes implemented to control soil-transmitted helminths (STH), are currently poorly monitored. There are a lot of aspects to be considered, including choice of metrics (e.g. prevalence vs. infection intensity), sampling strategy, sample size (number of schools, and number of subjects), sampling effort (number of stool samples per subject, number of examinations on the same stool sample), examination strategy (individual examination vs. examination of pooled stool samples), and diagnostic methods (e.g., qPCR, Mini-(FLOTAC), Kato-Katz thick smear, and McMaster egg counting method). Faced with similar challenges, veterinary parasitologist shave developed novel tools to determine impact of infections and to monitor the short and long term efficacy of anthelminthic drugs. Given the apparent similarities, these tools will also find applications in the control of human STH. We will illustrate how these tools cancontributeto the field of STH in terms of diagnosis, monitoring of efficacy, STH-host reactions and identification of sources of contamination.