Study limitations and mitigations
malaria, infections
MALARIA, INFECTIONS
Non-randomized control study designs usually suffer from limited ability to guarantee the comparability of the intervention and control groups. However, this limitation was mitigated by: (i) collecting baseline data on all known confounders (i.e. characteristics with the potential to influence the outcomes) for both the intervention and control groups, (ii) to separate the effect of the intervention from other environment factors we collected data on the primary outcome on monthly basis in both groups, with one data point before and the start of the intervention, (ii) The follow-up visits on both the intervention and control groups were conducted at the same time, and (iv) same data collection procedure was used to collect data on both the intervention and control groups.The study did not establish factors associated with breakthrough malaria infections among children receiving SPAQ. In the Karamoja region where SMC was deployed for the first time, understanding, and determining the factors associated with breakthrough infections could potentially guide decisions on the use of SPAQ as a chemotherapeutic agent for SMC, and scale up efforts for malaria control in the region. Further studies may be required to explore this.