Abstract
.For the past 10 years, the Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been supporting operational research to provide a stronger evidence base for controlling and moving toward elimination of schistosomiasis. The SCORE portfolio was developed and implemented with engagement from many stakeholders and sectors. Particular efforts were made to include endemic country neglected tropical disease program managers. Examples of the challenges we encountered include the need to balance rigor (e.g., conducting large cluster-randomized trials) with ensuring relevance to real-world settings, allowing for local contexts while standardizing key study aspects, adjusting to evolving technologies, and incorporating changing technologies into multiyear studies. The Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation’s findings and data and the collected specimens will continue to be useful in the years to come. Our experiences and lessons learned can benefit both program managers and researchers conducting similar work in the future.
Highlights
The Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation’s findings and data and the collected specimens will continue to be useful in the years to come
The Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE) was funded in December 2008 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to support research that would provide evidence leading to improved means to reduce morbidity from schistosomiasis and to move toward elimination, with a focus on countries in Africa.[1]
To answer questions about why some villages were persistent hot spots (PHS), SCORE built on the relationships and infrastructure that had been established within the consortium to quickly implement additional studies, some of which linked SCORE researchers from the gaining control studies with those working on snails and parasite population genetics
Summary
The Schistosomiasis Consortium for Operational Research and Evaluation (SCORE) was funded in December 2008 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to support research that would provide evidence leading to improved means to reduce morbidity from schistosomiasis and to move toward elimination, with a focus on countries in Africa.[1]. Infection prevalence and/or intensity despite several rounds of adequate mass drug administration (MDA).[3] To answer questions about why some villages were PHS, SCORE built on the relationships and infrastructure that had been established within the consortium to quickly implement additional studies, some of which linked SCORE researchers from the gaining control studies with those working on snails and parasite population genetics In another example, SCORE support for Leiden University Medical College to improve the up-converting lateral flow phosphor circulating anodic antigen (UCP-LF CAA) test contributed to SCORE assessments of point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (POC-CCA) performance in low-prevalence Schistosoma mansoni–endemic areas and helped better define the true prevalence of schistosomiasis in several areas within ongoing SCORE field studies.[4,5]
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