Bed Nets

[Jon Levatte]

Bednets are a simple, cost-effective solution to keep families safe from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Combined with household spraying, malaria testing and treatment, and vaccines in development, we are making progress in the fight to beat malaria for good.

Our malaria projects continue to prioritize young children and mothers, pregnant women, refugees and internally-displaced persons, hard-to-reach communities with little to no healthcare access, and frontline health workers who fight malaria in these communities.

Allegro has always let you highlight (aka "assign color") a net called "dummy". Just use the find box and type in "dummy" without quotes instead of a net name. It won't show up in the list of nets. No need to play around with the color box or skill. Same thing works for de-highlight.

Between 2018 and 2022, the project built the evidence needed to allow the World Health Organisation (WHO) to make a policy recommendation for dual active in nets. It also assessed their cost-effectiveness under pilot conditions. The project and its partners sought not only to establish the necessary evidence base needed to support an appropriate policy recommendation, but to also make the new nets a sustainable choice for countries looking for the best value for money in controlling malaria.

The project assessed the cost-effectiveness of the nets under operational pilot conditions, across countries representing different epidemiological, insecticide resistance and entomological profiles. The nets were first deployed in 2019 in Burkina Faso in West Africa. Additional countries were selected for pilots in 2020, 2021 and 2023. These pilots built understanding about the extra benefit these nets can bring in different settings, as well as operational learnings on the deployment of new types of nets. This information will help countries make informed decisions about how best to spend their malaria control budgets.

The catalytic market shaping work under NNP to increase supply and demand have laid the foundation for ensuring equitable and affordable access to novel vector control products. This was enhanced by the joint work of UK-based social finance company MedAccess and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who supported access to the new nets in 20+ countries by providing a volume guarantee that enabled BASF to reduce the price procurers pay for the nets.

Karen Johnson

Senior Project and Business Administrator

Dual-Insecticide Nets: Transforming Malaria Prevention in Sub-Saharan AfricaTake a deep dive into the ground-breaking New Nets Project! Funded by @Unitaid and the @Global Fund, and spearheaded by the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC), this initiative piloted the use of dual-insecticide mosquito nets in malaria-endemic countries from 2019 to 2022.

In this video, we explore the incredible impact of introducing 56 million state-of-the-art mosquito nets across 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Discover how these innovative nets have averted an estimated 13 million malaria cases and saved 24,600 lives, especially in areas grappling with insecticide-resistant mosquitoes.

My coauthors and I are especially concerned about the mothers who, because they are unemployed or make less money than their husbands/partners, have been left in a position with limited power to demand that their husbands/partners do more at home. In the paper, we talk about a woman named Audrey. Pre-pandemic, Audrey and her husband were trying to have another baby. But when the pandemic hit, Audrey lost her job and her husband had to work long hours, which led to frequent arguments. Because of those arguments, Audrey no longer wanted another baby. Despite Audrey's wishes, her husband (to use her words) sexually assaulted her by not pulling out during sex, and Audrey got pregnant. The pregnancy and the assault have taken a serious toll on Audrey's mental health, leading her into therapy and onto antidepressants.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has left Audrey without a full-time job, without her own health insurance, and with a toddler and a baby on the way. Essentially, the pandemic has left her in a tremendously difficult situation with very few options for herself and her children.

Many studies use surveys to determine how common some experience is in the population as a whole: How many women have dropped out of the workforce because of the pandemic; How many kids are falling behind because their schools are closed; How many dads are doing their fair share at home. That kind of research requires large samples that reflect the same demographics as the U.S.

For mothers, the feelings of judgment and failure that can come from breaking norms are especially threatening right now. Many mothers are already feeling isolated because of the pandemic, and breaking norms runs the risk of making them even more disconnected than they already are. Many mothers are still holding themselves to those standards, even when it undermines their wellbeing.

We also found that these norms served the interests of the powerful, even during a pandemic. Faced with intensive worker norms, many professional mothers found ways to get their work done, even if it meant sacrificing sleep or sacrificing their relationships or sacrificing their own wellbeing. Meanwhile, many mothers also became the default parent, even when they and their husbands/male partners were both working from home.

At the same time, having fewer social connections often meant these mothers had to do more on their own with less support (e.g., less support from extended family members or friends who might serve as a sounding board or step in to offer resources or assistance when needed, etc.).

Our society has long failed to support mothers in meeting the demands of paid work and parenting. And this pandemic has made painfully clear the need for adequate support. That includes universal access to affordable childcare. It also includes policies that reduce intensive work and parenting pressures and ensure that all families have access to the resources they need.

You know, I've been on a real tear lately with this idea of a budget being a moral document. Like, if you want to know what a family or a city or a country values, look at what they spend money on. What do they consider "essential"? What are they willing to cut out when times are lean? Obviously this isn't a perfect analogy, particularly when dealing with a household budget, but if we assume for the sake of argument that a given household is able to meet its basic needs, look at what they spend their "extra" money on. Maybe its hobbies or fancy coffee or a vacation. Those choices tell you what that person values, because even if we are assuming that basic needs are being met, money is usually finite. If I have $100 extra dollars this month, I can choose to spend it on a nice blanket or I can donate it to charity. Neither choice makes me a "good person" or a "bad person" but it does tell you what I value right now.

By the same token, when a town decides to close schools for children because covid cases are rising instead of closing bars, that tells you what the town values. Both choices are have costs, financial and otherwise. And both choices tell you what the town finds to be important. If we valued school, we would make it work.

For the newsletter this week, I\u2019m talking with sociologist Jessica Calarco about her recent research on mothers grappling with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during the pandemic. She\u2019s whipsmart, as you\u2019ll see below, and I love what she has to say about the work of sociology as a form of \u201Cungaslighting.\u201D Follow her on Twitter here \u2014 and if you have thoughts, praise, or questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. [Academics don\u2019t get a lot of explicit praise, in particular, just saying]

I\u2019m an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, and my research focuses on inequalities in family life and education. I\u2019m also the mom of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old whose antics and insights and general hilariousness are getting me through the darker days of the pandemic.

This research grew out of a project examining how mothers navigate parenting controversies in making decisions for themselves and their children (e.g., decisions about breastfeeding, co-sleeping, vaccines, screen time, and employment after childbirth). The project started in 2018 with surveys of pregnant women in Southern Indiana, and we\u2019ve been following up with those same mothers with surveys and in-depth interviews every six months.

In the interviews we conducted early in the pandemic, mothers told us about waking up at 5 am to work before their kids got up, trying to keep toddlers occupied during conference calls, losing their jobs and their childcare in the same week, fighting with their partners about whether or not to wear masks, and doubling or tripling their kids\u2019 normal screen time, just so they could get a break. My coauthors and I (Amy Knopf, Assistant Professor, Indiana University School of Nursing; Emily Meanwell, Clinical Professor of Sociology, Indiana University; Elizabeth Anderson, PhD student in Sociology, Indiana University) made the decision to develop a follow-up project called The Pandemic Parenting Study.

The first paper we\u2019ve developed (\u201CLet\u2019s Not Pretend It\u2019s Fun\u201D) focuses on pandemic-related childcare disruptions: Among the mothers who have greatly increased the time they are spending with their children, 80% report that they are experiencing more stress during the pandemic, 72% report that they are experiencing more anxiety during the pandemic, and 56% report that they are experiencing more frustrations with their kids.

Because of intensive work pressures and intensive parenting pressures, and because of a lack of adequate support from the government, their employers, or their partners, mothers who are working from home without childcare feel like failures \u2014 as both workers and mothers. They also blame themselves for those failures. Many are turning to turn to food and alcohol as ways to cope \u2014 even hiding out eating Oreos in the bathroom to give themselves a break. Some mothers are also dropping out of the workforce to reduce the stress they face.

3a8082e126