Fig. 1

Observed and fitted microfilariae (mf) age-prevalences of lymphatic filariasis (LF) for twenty-two study sites. The cyan lines denote the SIR BM model fits to observed baseline mf prevalences in different age-groups (red squares with binomial error-bars) from each of the 22 study sites. The age-groups in the figures are represented by the mid-point of the groups studied in each community. Study sites and details of survey data are described in Table 1. All mf prevalence values were standardized to reflect sampling of 1 ml blood volumes using a transformation factor of 1.95 and 1.15 respectively for values originally estimated using 20 or 100 μL blood volumes [49]