As I write this blog, some 1,500 malaria specialists are taking part in the first day of a major conference being held in Nairobi this week. Many important presentations on malaria research will be delivered during the event, but a conference is a place to confer and should not be merely a series of lectures delivered to passive audiences. To help make the 5th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria Pan-African Malaria Conference a more interactive affair, TropIKA.net has established a “knowledge hub” for the meeting, where we are providing background documents, news, summaries and blogs. Everything we publish on the site allows registered users to add their own observations and opinions on the latest developments in Nairobi.

TropIKA.net spoke, before the conference began, to ten researchers making presentations of particular importance. These interviews have been published within the knowledge hub. We will be conducting further interviews, in which we ask young African scientists and senior figures in malaria control for their reactions to these presentations. Some of the presenters we spoke to have views that could prove highly controversial. Frank Baiden from Ghana says we need to take a long, hard look at the data on malaria in Africa: “Do we have the numbers right?” he asks, “How confident are we that these cases are all malaria?” He and others we spoke to query whether the declines now being seen in case numbers in several parts of Africa are the result of new interventions, or whether something else is going on. James Tibenderana (Uganda) alleges that previous efforts to promote the integrated management of childhood infections have “died a natural death”. Paul Milligan (UK) says that the way in which data from vaccine trials are analysed should be changed, in order to provide better measures of their impact on disease burden. And Hilary Ranson (UK) says “alarmingly high” levels of insecticide resistance are now being recorded. Let other TropIKA.net readers know your opinion on what these researchers have told us.

Thanks to the Internet, there are now also virtual places to confer and TropIKA.net provides such a facility throughout the year – not just in the present ‘conference season’. We continue to report on major new developments relating to the infectious disease of poverty. A recent example is the publication of new estimates showing that Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae type B are responsible for as many child deaths as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

Epidemics of other infectious diseases have also featured in our pages. This has been a very serious year for meningococcal meningitis in Africa’s meningitis belt, and cholera outbreaks have afflicted many parts of the African continent, including Nairobi – a city in which ironically malaria is not actually transmitted, according to new findings.

We have also highlighted reviews that provide updates on what is known about cholera and about fascioliasis, and a major report on global progress with vaccination programmes.

But we do not neglect the basic end of research. It will be interesting to see whether some very preliminary findings recently reported may one day lead to a role for chocolate in malaria treatment or for anti-obesity drugs to treat dengue fever. What do you think? Let us know.

Paul Chinnock
Editor, TropIKA.net