Cost-effectiveness of three malaria treatment strategies in rural Tigray, Ethiopia where both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax co-dominate

The study was conducted under a routine health service delivery following the national malaria diagnosis and treatment guideline. Every suspected malaria case, who presented to a health extension worker either at a village or health post, was included. Costing, from the provider's perspective, only included diagnosis and antimalarial drugs. Effectiveness was measured by the number of correctly treated cases (CTC) and average and incremental cost-effectiveness calculated. One-way and two-way sensitivity analyses were conducted for selected parameters.In total 2,422 subjects and 35 health posts were enrolled in the study. The average cost-effectiveness ratio showed that the parascreen pan/pf based strategy was more cost-effective (US$1.69/CTC) than both the paracheck pf (US$4.66/CTC) and the presumptive (US$11.08/CTC) based strategies. The incremental cost for the parascreen pan/pf based strategy was US$0.59/CTC to manage 65% more cases. The sensitivity analysis also confirmed parascreen pan/pf based strategy as the most cost-effective.This study showed that the parascreen pan/pf based strategy should be the preferred option to be used at health post level in rural Tigray. This finding is relevant nationwide as the entire country's malaria epidemiology is similar to the study area.Malaria continues to be a global challenge with half of the world's population at risk of the disease. In 2006 about 250 million episodes of malaria occurred globally with nearly a million deaths, mostly of children under 5 years of age. More than 85% of this disease burden was concentrated in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Ethiopia was one of the five main contributors to the overall African malaria burden [1,2].In Ethiopia, despite the long history of malaria control since the 1950s, the disease is still a major public health problem[3]. Though some improvements, both in mortality and morbidity, have been recently achieved, malaria has been consistently reported as one of the three