Dr Drissa Coulibaly work’s results will help to update strategies for malaria elimination in Mali

One of the main objectives Dr Coulibaly has set himself is to provide evidence to his national malaria control programme in order to better targetd control interventions.
In Mali, malaria represents 32% of the consultations, revealed the General Secretary of the Malian Minister of Health and Public Hygiene, Dr. Mama Coumaré during one of his communication published by the online web site afrobone.com dating from April 2018.
Medical Doctor specialized in Parasitology, Dr. Drissa Coulibaly, is a MARCAD postdoc fellow. He is a researcher based at the Malaria Research and Training Center (MRTC) of the University of Sciences Techniques and Technologies of Bamako (USTTB), Mali.
Dr Coulibaly is one of the Malian researchers whose principal aim is to contribute to malaria elimination in the continent.

“I suffered a lot from malaria when I was young. That’s why I decided to become a medical doctor to cure people from diseases particularly malaria. During my medicine school classes, I was very fascinated by Pr Ogobara Doumbo’s lectures. He talked regulary about the impact of sciences on our live. At the end of the medical school, I came to the institution headed by Pr Doumbo to do my thesis and to have chance to do research leading to threw away malaria from the world” he confessed.
Malaria remains a public health problem, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The continent paid a heavy tribe to the disease in term of morbidity, mortality and economic loss.
In its December 2016 report, the World Health Organization points out that Sub-Saharan Africa still accounts for a disproportionate share of the global malaria burden. By 2015, this region accounted for 90% of the cases and 92% of the deaths due to this disease.
Dr Coulibaly’s childhood story with malaria fueled his desire to fight against it.
‘’ Medical science permits to understand the mechanism by which, people get sick. Science allows us to r improve the health of people and the quality of their lives at the same time’’ he argued.
Actually, he is conducting a research project on the use of spatial and temporal dynamic of malaria to optimize control intervention toward malaria elimination.
According to him, he chose this topic to provide evidence to the policy-makers for targeting control intervention in the context of limited resources particularly in Mali.
‘’ A clear understanding of malaria distribution in time and space is a key element needed to guide malaria control programmes” he said.
In his research project Dr Coulibaly followed a group of three hundred children, aged from 6 months to 15 years, in Bandiagara, Mali to measure the malaria incidence and to establish space and time distribution pattern of malaria in a context of scaling up control strategies.
Some preliminary results of Doctor Coulibaly’s research showed a decrease in malaria incidence and the heterogeneity of malaria in space and time.
“The expected impact of my research is that the implementation of our study findings will contribute to a better use of the limited resources and also will contribute in the speed up of the malaria elimination goal.”
At the end of his project, Dr Coulibaly plans to share the results with the Malian malaria control programme.