5.5 Parameter Estimation

Some important parameters are:

The duration of untreated malaria infections and the accuracy of various diagnostic methods in humans at different ages and with different histories of exposure;
The frequency of full and partial treatment with anti-malarial drugs overall; and especially the promptness of treatment in response to severe malaria;
Human travel and mobility;
Human demography, including birth rates, age-specific death rates and migration;
The frequency of other causes of fever and disease and their interactions with malaria;
Baseline adult mosquito bionomic parameters: mosquito population density, blood feeding rates and habits, and mosquito survival and dispersal;
The effect of weather and resource availability on baseline adult mosquito bionomics and mosquito population dynamics, including aquatic mosquito populations;
The mix of local vector species and the frequency of insecticide resistance;
Spatial heterogeneity in the local coverage of various kinds of vector control;
Local behaviors and the effects and effect sizes of vector control;

Models are approximations. We make a distinction between biological processes and observational processes.