| Summary: | Tom Peto and colleagues point out, reasonably, that the effect of mass drug administration (MDA) on malaria could be affected substantially by patterns of human movement, and that our Article1 does not consider the effects of the specific patterns of movement they observed in Cambodia and west Africa. The purpose of our Article1 was to derive general results about the possible effect of MDA and to test how robust these are to the assumptions in different models, so we avoided assumptions about population movement that are specific to any particular place. Migration is among several factors that the different groups in our collaboration have investigated as potential modifiers of the effects of mass treatment in specific situations. For those analyses, we have used field data or realistic assumptions of migration rates.2–4 Human migration is a particularly complicated modifier; the endemicity of malaria in the places from which immigrants or temporary visitors originate could be important, not just the season and extent of migration.
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