Fig. 2

Relationships between malaria exposure (EIR), effective coverage, and prevalence for Method A (a) and Method B (b). a Method A: plotted empirical relationship of prevalence as a function of EIR relationship [6] (Eq. 1) with data used to fit this relationship. The relationship between standardized prevalence and EIR is approximately linear-log for all the data (grey curve fitted relationship over all data). The relationship varies by study (purple colour dots a correspond to data from a single field study, purple curve the fitted relationship to those data) and by method (red dots correspond to measurements taken via pyrethroid spray catches, and purple and blue dots measurements taken by other methods. Red and blue curves correspond to the respective fits). b Method B: OpenMalaria simulations of the relationship between prevalence and EIR (model variant R0133 only, other models shown in Additional file 2: Figure S3) for discrete levels of coverage of effective treatment (points) and best fitted model to these data as Hill functions (curve for different levels of effective treatment) (Eq. 3). Colour indicates the level of effective treatment (E ₁₄), with red 0.001 %, yellow 5 %, light blue 20 %, dark blue 40 %