Working alongside government to curb malaria contamination

Sanjeev Roy is a UN Volunteer Provincial Malaria Officer in Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR). He is with the World Health Organization (WHO) and supports the government’s drive to curb malaria contamination in hard-to-reach areas of Attapeu, the country's southern province. From fine-tuning surveillance systems for malaria elimination to tailoring malaria interventions in an ethnically and geographically diverse context, Sanjeev gives us a brief look into his volunteer assignment that promotes Sustainable Development Goal 3 — Good health and well-being.

A national of Nepal, Sanjeev Roy joined WHO in 2022. He has previous experience in working with malaria infection in his native Nepal, which has seen considerable success in eliminating the life-threatening disease.

In his volunteer assignment, Sanjeev supports malaria surveillance as well as the reporting of new infections. One of surveillance programme he works on is called, ‘Accelerator Strategies’, a Government-led programme that involves Targeted Drug Administration and Intermittent Preventive Treatment for forest goers. WHO jointly conducts these programmes along with the Ministry of Health through provinces, districts, and health centers and with the local-level support of village malaria workers and mobile malaria workers.

“I supported the mapping of the hard-to-reach areas and populations to tailor responses to malaria. This included outreach activities to raise awareness of the population on how they can protect themselves from malaria,” says Sanjeev. As a UN Volunteer, he contributed to the regular data analysis through the District Health Information Software 2 — this accumulates monthly data on passive cases and stocks from all public health facilities, private health vendors and community health workers for an efficient prevention approach.

The data indicated that total malaria and Plasmodium falciparum cases in the district declined by 87 per cent and 80 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022.  Five parasite species cause malaria in humans, and 2 of these species — Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax — pose the greatest threat.

Seeing tangible results of a province with a history of high burden of disease are now close to eliminating malaria was the most gratifying experience of my volunteering work within the United Nations. I was contributing to good health and well-being of the local population." Sanjeev Roy, UN Volunteer Provincial Malaria Officer with WHO, Lao PDR.

Sanjeev shares knowledge and trains community workers on how to sustain malaria elimination targets. Dr. Oyuntogos Lkhasuren is the Acting Representative of WHO in Lao and commends Sanjeev’s volunteer actions in tackling malaria in remote areas.

Sanjeev is a medical doctor with prior experience in malaria elimination from other countries, specifically Nepal, which is in an advanced stage of elimination. This provides him the foresight for strengthening the detailed and complex work that is required to investigate, understand, and eliminate malaria transmission as well as document the process, an essential requisite for achieving malaria elimination certification." Dr. Oyuntogos Lkhasuren, Acting WHO’s Representative in Lao PDR.

The challenges of working in remote parts of the country, language barriers, cultural differences, and being away from his family do not hamper Sanjeev's motivation. Rather, he looks at it positively and reflects, “The welcoming nature of people in the community turns my daily life into a beautiful experience.”

Attapeu province bears the highest burden of malaria in Lao PDR with 6,011 (35 per cent) of the 17,328 total cases recorded nationally in the last 5 years (2019-2023). Even further, 48 per cent of the total cases in this province were reported in one of its remote districts — Phouvong. This district has large ethnic minority groups, who suffer high malaria caseloads due to their high-risk behaviors, including farmers living outside the village in forest fringe areas for a duration that ranges from days up to more than half a year, as well as people with regular movement to the deep forest for activities related to daily living. Per estimates, one in six people who live in these remote villages is contaminated with malaria at least once a year.

 

Sanjeev Roy (right) UN Volunteer Provincial Malaria Officer on a field visit for the Seroprevalence survey. This data shows the number of people in a population who test positive for a specific disease based on blood serum specimens. @ WHO, 2024.