Prevalence of Malaria Parasites in People Working in Illegal Gold Mining in French Guiana

Malaria is the most widespread parasitic illness in the world, and it is endemic to Guiana. Although the number of cases has decreased since 2005, sources of infection still remain, particularly within illegal gold mines. These malaria carriers/sufferers often use self-medication to deal with malaria symptoms, resulting in a risk of resistance to anti-malarial treatments, and particularly to artemisinine. The mobility of this population across the Guiana Shield increases both the risk of malaria spreading and the resistance of this illness to treatment in the region, and puts the population at risk of new outbreaks of this disease despite the great efforts put into anti-malarial policy in this region.

Fighting malaria within this population is therefore a dual public health challenge: on the one hand, make it possible for the WHO to eliminate malaria from the Guiana Shield by 2017, on the other to limit resistance to artemisinine in this region. However, Guiana's particular context - namely the illegal status of gold mines and the difficult geographical access, the Harpie military operations, the illegality of carrying out malarial diagnosis tests and treating cases without the presence of a health professional - prevents us from achieving this goal using the same tools as our neighbours in Suriname, whose " Looking for Gold, Finding Malaria " programme was a success.

A better understanding of the malarial epidemiology in this population will enable us to propose innovative, more adapted measures to combat malaria within these guyanese populations. This is an transversal, multicentric observational study.