3 ms·
The summary article is somewhat vague on the actual result. It seems to imply that villages were in or out of the control group en-masse but doesn't explicitly
by bdamm 8y ago
The summary article is somewhat vague on the actual result. It seems to imply that villages were in or out of the control group en-masse but doesn't explicitly say so:
> For the 18-week study researchers recruited 2,700 people, including 590 children, across eight villages with half in the treatment group receiving a dose of ivermectin every three weeks.
> Regular visits from nurses were used to assess children for malaria symptoms and confirmed with a blood test and it found twice as many children in the treatment group had no malaria attacks.
> In all there were an average of 2 malaria attacks per child in the treatment group compared to 2.49 in the control villages, without any additional harmful side effects.
- Someone 8y agohttps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32321-3/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... is a lot clearer: ”We invited villages (clusters) in Burkina Faso to participate in a single-blind (outcomes assessor), parallel-assignment, two-arm, cluster-randomised trial over the 2015 rainy season. Villages were assigned (1:1) by random draw to either the intervention group or the control group.” I find it interesting how that draw was done: ”Randomisation was done at a public event at the Health District offices in Diebougou, attended by members of the study team, community health workers from all eight villages, and the local health clinic nurses. In front of the attendees, the words “treatment” (ie, “intervention”) and “control” were written on four cards each, which were then sealed in identical opaque envelopes, mixed in a container, and randomly pulled from the container by each community health worker representing their village.” I guess that helped gain the trust of the participants. The text also shows how poor Burkina Faso is. Of the 590 children in the 18 week long experiment, they lost 6 because they died.