Seasonal malaria chemoprevention and the spread of Plasmodium falciparum quintuple-mutant parasites resistant to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine: a modelling study

Abstract

Background: Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine plus amodiaquine prevents millions of clinical malaria cases in children younger than 5 years in Africa's Sahel region. However, Plasmodium falciparum parasites partially resistant to sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (with quintuple mutations) potentially threaten the protective effectiveness of SMC. We evaluated the spread of quintuple-mutant parasites and the clinical consequences.

Methods: We used an individual-based malaria transmission model with explicit parasite dynamics and drug pharmacological models to identify and quantify the influence of factors driving quintuple-mutant spread and predict the time needed for the mutant to spread from 1% to 50% of inoculations for several SMC deployment strategies. We estimated the impact of this spread on SMC effectiveness against clinical malaria.

Findings: Higher transmission intensity, SMC coverage, and expanded age range of chemoprevention promoted mutant spread. When SMC was implemented in a high-transmission setting (40% parasite prevalence in children aged 2-10 years) with four monthly cycles to children aged 3 months to 5 years (with 95% initial coverage declining each cycle), the quintuple mutant required 53·1 years (95% CI 50·5-56·0) to spread from 1% to 50% of inoculations. This time increased in lower-transmission settings and reduced by half when SMC was extended to children aged 3 months to 10 years, or reduced by 10-13 years when an additional monthly cycle of SMC was deployed. For the same setting, the effective reduction in clinical cases in children receiving SMC was 79·0% (95% CI 77·8-80·8) and 60·4% (58·6-62·3) during the months of SMC implementation when the quintuple mutant was absent or fixed in the population, respectively.

Interpretation: SMC with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine plus amodiaquine leads to a relatively slow spread of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine-resistant quintuple mutants and remains effective at preventing clinical malaria despite the mutant spread. SMC with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine plus amodiaquine should be considered in seasonal settings where this mutant is already prevalent.

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation and Marie Curie Individual Fellowship.