Filomeno Fortes

Professor Filomeno Fortes, M.D., Ph.D. began his career in 1982 as a physician in Angola, his home country. His early responsibilities included serving as Director of Health for the Provinces of Huila (1982-1984) and Luanda (1984-1988), where he played a key role in the planning, management, and monitoring of health systems, services, and disease control programs at the provincial level. This fundamental experience preceded a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Health Policies at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1990.

In recognition of his growing expertise, Professor Fortes was appointed to coordinate the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) from 1992 to 2016. Concurrently, he led several critical national public health initiatives, including the National Directorate of Endemic Diseases Control (1994-2000), the National Department for Disease Control (2000-2016), and the Technical Committee for Onchocerciasis Elimination (2000-2017), all in Angola.

Since 1992, Professor Fortes has also held a teaching position at the Faculty of Medicine of the Agostinho Neto University in Luanda. In this capacity, he has cultivated longstanding collaborations with international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, Global Fund, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Population Services International (PSI), Mentor Initiative, and the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, which have been instrumental in promoting several operational research programs.

The combination of his extensive research background and leadership in disease control programs in Angola led Professor Filomeno Fortes to engage with international academic institutions, including the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (IHMT) at NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal, where he completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences in 2011, as well as the University of Montpellier, France, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Brazil and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USA, among others.

More recently, as Director of IHMT-NOVA during the COVID-19 pandemics, Professor Fortes further honed his expertise in evidence-based public health, playing a pivotal role in coordinating the institution’s efforts in infectious disease emergency response, training, and applied research, with a particular focus on the most affected communities.

Generating evidence for the malaria treatment policy in Angola.

With the emergence of resistance to common antimalarials such as chloroquine, amodiaquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), there was a need to monitor the levels of antimalaria drug resistance and provide an evidence basis for changes in the national treatment guidelines in Angola.

We pioneered the study of the efficacy of artemisinin-based therapies (ACTs) in Angola and established the SP usefulness for the intermittent preventive therapy of malaria in pregnant women and young children, despite the identification of some mutations associated with resistance at the pfdhfr and pfdhpr loci. More recently, we provided evidence suggesting a decreased efficacy of the artemether-lumefantrine combination for P. falciparum malaria.

1. Rosillo et al. Molecular Markers of Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine Resistance in Samples from Children with Uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum at Three Sites in Angola in 2019. Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 2023;67:e0160122. doi: 10.1128/aac.01601-22.
2. Tavares et al. Malaria in Angola: recent progress, challenges and future opportunities using parasite demography studies. Malar J. 2022;21:396. doi: 10.1186/s12936-022-04424-y.
3. Gasparinho et al. Impact of Annual Albendazole versus Four-Monthly Test-and-Treat Approach of Intestinal Parasites on Children Growth-A Longitudinal Four-Arm Randomized Parallel Trial during Two Years of a Community Follow-Up in Bengo, Angola. Pathogens. 2021 Mar 7;10(3):309. doi: 10.3390/pathogens10030309.
4. Morais et al. Insect-specific flaviviruses and densoviruses, suggested to have been transmitted vertically, found in mosquitoes collected in Angola: Genome detection and phylogenetic characterization of viral sequences. Infect Genet Evol. 2020;80:104191. doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2020.104191.
5. Ayres et al. The V410L knockdown resistance mutation occurs in island and continental populations of Aedes aegypti in West and Central Africa. PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 2020;14:e0008216. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0008216.