Coverage of Intermittent Preventive Treatment of Malaria in Infants after Four Years of Implementation in Sierra Leone.

Intermittent Preventive Treatment of malaria in infants (IPTi) is a malaria control strategy consisting of the administration of an anti-malarial drug alongside routine immunizations. So far, this is being implemented nationwide in Sierra Leone only. IPTi has been renamed as Perennial Malaria Chemoprevention -PMC-, accounting for its recently recommended expansion into the second year of life. Before starting a pilot implementation on PMC, the currently implemented strategy and malaria prevalence were assessed in young children in selected areas of Sierra Leone. A cross-sectional, community-based, multi-stage cluster household survey was conducted from November to December 2021 in selected districts of the Northern and northwestern provinces of Sierra Leone among 10–23 months old children, whose caretakers gave written informed consent to participate in the survey. Coverage of IPTi and malaria prevalence—assessed with rapid diagnostic tests—were calculated using percentages and 95