First of all, a small clarification—we are seeking $6M for various purposes; the cost of the RCT should be about $1.5M. To the main point: historical data from the Ministry of Health on Anopheles mosquitoes supports the same conclusions but was not included in the publication (history of malaria data per district has not been shared with us by the government). As highlighted in the paper, the intervention was a pilot and NOT a clustered randomized control trial (cRCT), though it was the Ministry of Health (and not us) who selected the intervention and control areas.
In other words, we do need a cRCT to fully validate our method, but the existing evidence is definitely strong enough to justify spending $1.5M on rolling out such an cRCT.
Hope this answers your questions. Let me know if something is still unclear.
Thanks again. This, too, is a good point.
First of all, a small clarification—we are seeking $6M for various purposes; the cost of the RCT should be about $1.5M. To the main point: historical data from the Ministry of Health on Anopheles mosquitoes supports the same conclusions but was not included in the publication (history of malaria data per district has not been shared with us by the government). As highlighted in the paper, the intervention was a pilot and NOT a clustered randomized control trial (cRCT), though it was the Ministry of Health (and not us) who selected the intervention and control areas.
In other words, we do need a cRCT to fully validate our method, but the existing evidence is definitely strong enough to justify spending $1.5M on rolling out such an cRCT.
Hope this answers your questions. Let me know if something is still unclear.
Thanks!
Yes it does, thank you for the added context!