News Release

How text messaging can help control malaria

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Dejan Zurovac and colleagues from the Kenya Medical Research Institute/Wellcome Trust Research Program, Nairobi, Kenya discuss six areas where text messaging could improve the delivery of health services and health outcomes in malaria in Africa, including three areas transmitting information from the periphery of the health system to malaria control managers and three areas transmitting information to support management of malaria patients.

The authors state: "The widespread use of short messaging service (SMS), the least expensive mobile phone function, offers a solution that could rapidly overcome weaknesses in communication potentially leading to improved delivery of health services and better health outcomes… We consider text messaging interventions that have the potential for immediate scale-up, benefiting from the widespread availability of basic mobile phones that do not require installation and maintenance of additional applications."

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Funding: DZ is supported by the Wellcome Trust project grant [#084253]. RWS is supported by the Wellcome Trust as Principal Research Fellow [#079080]. AOT is supported by the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) through a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant [#48807.01]. All authors acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust core grant [#092654/Z/10/A]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Citation: Zurovac D, Talisuna AO, Snow RW (2012) Mobile Phone Text Messaging: Tool for Malaria Control in Africa. PLoS Med 9(2): e1001176. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001176

CONTACT:
Dejan Zurovac
Kenya Medical Research Institute/Wellcome Trust Research Programme
Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group
P.O. Box 43640-00100
Nairobi
Kenya
dzurovac@nairobi.kemri-wellcome.org


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