[Urgent tasks of malaria elimination programs].

The state-of-the-art of malaria elimination programs worldwide and the advances made in the past decade were analyzed and assessed. The factors contributing to or reducing the achievement of the final objective of malaria elimination--to interrupt the local transmission of the infection and to steadily maintain the achieved successes are given. Technical problems are defined at the final stages of a malaria elimination program. The problems include difficulties in identifying patients and asymptomatic parasite carriers due to the low level of malaria transmission and the absence of highly effective methods for detecting malaria parasites with low parasitemia, as well as mixed malaria infections requiring the use of different treatment regimens and antimalarial drugs. Large-scale uncontrolled population migration is noted to be of importance in spreading the infection in a malaria-free area. The solution of urgent tasks is to improve the existing methods and develop new ones for the detection and treatment of the infection and a package of antimalarial measures.