This week in PLoS Medicine: Mapping Malaria in Kenya; Malaria Parasites and Paediatric fever estimates; Funding for maternal and child health and more

This week four articles were published in PLoS Medicine, including two articles on malaria in our research section. Philip Bejon and colleagues document the clustering of malaria episodes and malarial parasite infection. These patterns may enable future prediction of hotspots of malaria infection and targeting of treatment or preventive interventions. Peter Gething and colleagues compute the number of fevers likely to present to public health facilities in Africa and the estimated number of these fevers likely to be infected with Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites, contributing to ongoing scientific and policy debates about optimum clinical and financial strategies for the introduction of new diagnostics.

Our series on maternal, neonatal, and child health in sub-Saharan Africa continues with Valerie Snewin and colleagues discussing the challenges of implementation and research capacity in Africa and the need for stronger research systems to reach maternal and child health goals. See the earlier blog about the series with all articles which lists all the articles as they are published.

Also on the subject of maternal and child health, a Policy Forum by Marco Schäferhoff and colleagues critiques funding estimates for the maternal and child health Millennium Development Goals, and make recommendations for improving the tracking of financing flows and estimating the costs of scaling up interventions for mothers and children.

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