Table 1.
Definition of key terms used in this paper
| Terms | Definition |
|---|---|
| All-cause child mortality rate | Probability of dying from any cause between the first and fifth birthday per 1,000 children who survived to age 12 months17 |
| Civil registration and vital statistics | A system for recording vital events in a population, including births and deaths, with medical certification of the cause of death according to the rules and procedures of the International Classification of Diseases |
| Confirmed malaria case | Suspected malaria case in which malaria parasites have been demonstrated in a patient's blood by microscopy or a rapid diagnostic test32 |
| Contextual factors | Non-malaria programs and other factors, such as rainfall, socioeconomic status, urbanization, and policy changes, that could confound the association between scale-up of the intervention and its potential health impact or modify the effect of the intervention, and affect the conclusion |
| Impact evaluation | Within the context of this paper, impact evaluation refers to the potential contribution of a package of malaria control interventions, which could be considered the national malaria program, to a given outcome |
| Malaria parasitemia | Presence of malaria parasites in the blood or number of parasites per volume of blood |
| Malaria parasite prevalence | Proportion of children ages 6–59 months with malaria parasite infection17 |
| Malaria transmission | Spread of malaria by completion of a full transmission cycle (man→mosquito→human) |
| Malaria transmission intensity (force of infection) | Measured as entomological inoculation rate (EIR): the number of infectious mosquito bites a person is exposed to in a certain time period, typically a year |
| Malaria-specific mortality | Deaths in which malaria was the underlying cause. The World Health Organization (1993) defines it as “the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death” |
| Plausibility argument | An assumption that mortality reductions can be attributed to programs if improvements are found along the causal pathway between intervention scale-up and mortality trends7 |
| Population-level malaria morbidity indicators | Indicators on malaria morbidity collected through population-based surveys; examples are malaria parasite prevalence and anemia |
| Under-five mortality | Probability of dying before the fifth birthday per 1,000 live births |
| Verbal autopsy | A method for determining cause of death. A knowledgeable person in the household where a deceased person lived is asked about signs and symptoms of the terminal illness, usually 1–6 months after the death.18,22,28 To attribute causes of deaths, interviews are analyzed by an algorithm or clinicians who decide on causes by majority vote6 |