Background Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is widely used as a vector control measure, although there are conflicting findings of its effectiveness in reducing malaria incidence. The objective of this study was to estimate the effect of multiple IRS rounds on malaria incidence and hemoglobin levels in a cohort of children in rural southeastern Uganda. Methods The study was based upon a dynamic cohort of children aged 0.5–10 years enrolled from August 2011 to June 2017 in Nagongera Subcounty. Confirmed malaria infections and hemoglobin levels were recorded over time for each participant. After each of 4 rounds of IRS, malaria incidence, hemoglobin levels, and parasite density were evaluated and compared with pre-IRS levels. Analyses were carried out at the participant level while accounting for repeated measures and clustering by household. Results Incidence rate ratios comparing post-IRS to pre-IRS incidence rates for age groups 0–3, 3–5, and 5–11 were 0.108 (95% confidence interval [CI], .078–.149), 0.173 (95% CI, .136–.222), and 0.226 (95% CI, .187–.274), respectively. The mean hemoglobin levels significantly increased from 11.01 (pre-IRS) to 12.18 g/dL (post-IRS). Conclusions Our study supports the policy recommendation of IRS usage in a stable and perennial transmission area to rapidly reduce malaria transmission.

In the context of climate change, a nutritional transition, and increased pressures to migrate internally and internationally, this study examined the relationship between seasonal food insecurity and demographic, socioeconomic, and agricultural production factors among small-scale subsistence farmers in rural northern Honduras. Anchored by a partnership with the Fundación para la Investigación Participativa con Agricultores de Honduras (FIPAH) and the Yorito Municipal Health Centre, a cross-sectional household survey was administered in Yorito, Honduras, in July 2014. The study population included 1263 individuals from 248 households across 22 rural communities. A multivariate mixed effects negative binomial regression model was built to investigate the relationship between the self-reported number of months without food availability and access from subsistence agriculture in the previous year (August 2013–July 2014) and demographic, socioeconomic, and agricultural production variables. This study found a lengthier ‘lean season’ among surveyed household than previously documented in Honduras. Overall, 62.2% (95% confidence interval (CI): [59.52, 64.87]) of individuals experienced at least four months of insufficient food in the previous year. Individuals from poorer and larger households were more likely to experience insufficient food compared to individuals from wealthier and smaller households. Additionally, individuals from households that produced both maize and beans were less likely to have insufficient food compared to individuals from households that did not grow these staple crops (prevalence ratio (PR) = 0.83; 95% CI: [0.69, 0.99]). Receiving remittances from a migrant family member did not significantly reduce the prevalence of having insufficient food. As unpredictable crop yields linked to climate change and extreme weather events are projected to negatively influence the food security and nutrition outcomes of rural populations, it is important to understand how demographic, socioeconomic, and agricultural production factors may modify the ability of individuals and households engaged in small-scale subsistence agriculture to respond to adverse shocks.

BackgroundMalaria transmission is driven by multiple factors, including complex and multifaceted connections between malaria transmission, socioeconomic conditions, climate and interventions. Forecasting models should account for all significant drivers of malaria incidence although it is first necessary to understand the relationship between malaria burden and the various determinants of risk to inform the development of forecasting models. In this study, the associations between malaria risk, environmental factors, and interventions were evaluated through a systematic review.MethodsFive electronic databases (CAB Abstracts, EMBASE, Global Health, MEDLINE and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses) were searched for studies that included both the effects of the environment and interventions on malaria within the same statistical model. Studies were restricted to quantitative analyses and health outcomes of malaria mortality or morbidity, outbreaks, or transmission suitability. Meta-analyses were conducted on a subset of results using random-effects models.ResultsEleven studies of 2248 potentially relevant articles that met inclusion criteria were identified for the systematic review and two meta-analyses based upon five results each were performed. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index was not found to be statistically significant associated with malaria with a pooled OR of 1.10 (95% CI 0.07, 1.71). Bed net ownership was statistically associated with decreasing risk of malaria, when controlling for the effects of environment with a pooled OR of 0.75 (95% CI 0.60, 0.95). In general, environmental effects on malaria, while controlling for the effect of interventions, were variable and showed no particular pattern. Bed nets ownership, use and distribution, have a significant protective effect while controlling for environmental variables.ConclusionsThere are a limited number of studies which have simultaneously evaluated both environmental and interventional effects on malaria risk. Poor statistical reporting and a lack of common metrics were important challenges for this review, which must be addressed to ensure reproducibility and quality research. A comprehensive or inclusive approach to identifying malaria determinants using standardized indicators would allow for a better understanding of its epidemiology, which is crucial to improve future malaria risk estimations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12936-018-2220-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.