Tracking dengue on your mobile
Using mobile phone data to track people's movements can help predict
how dengue fever spreads, epidemiologists have shown in Pakistan.
The disease only appeared in northeast Pakistan in recent years,
after being "largely confined" to the southern city of Karachi, the
study says. As the transmission of the virus that causes dengue fever is
partly driven by human travel, analyzing how people move across the
country allows researchers to predict when and where epidemics may break
out.
In a study published on September 8 in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, researchers teamed up with Telenor, a
Norwegian mobile provider that operates in Pakistan, to analyze call
records from about 40 million subscriber SIM cards in the last seven
months of 2013.
Caroline Buckee, a co-author of the paper and epidemiologist at the
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in the United States, says
her team only had access to anonymised, aggregated data on the number of
mobile users moving between base station transmitters, rather than
individual call records.
The researchers used this data set to create a mathematical model of
travel patterns, which they combined with clinical and climate data to
model dengue dynamics.
Then, they applied the model retroactively to predict the likely
location and timing of epidemics across the country.
The travel model predicted the geographic spread and timing of
outbreaks in 2013 in both recently epidemic and emerging locations, the
paper says. For example, it showed a good overlap with the actual
pattern of the first dengue cases in the northeastern cities of Lahore
and Mingora.
Kenth Engø-Monsen, a senior data scientist at Telenor Research who
coauthored the paper, says the study is a "proof of concept" with
encouraging results.
The authors write: "This approach provides policy-relevant, real-time
information about where and when to expect dengue epidemics and
therefore how to effectively target interventions, surveillance and
clinical response." But they concede that the study excludes
international travel patterns, which play a role in dengue transmission.
"The use of mobile phone records and big data analysis are an
innovative approach to map human movement," say Josefina Coloma and
Heather Zornetzer of the ICT for Health Program at the Sustainable
Sciences Institute in the United States.
"The data obtained in Pakistan seems an accurate representation of
general patterns in that country," they wrote in an email to SciDev.Net.
They add that predictive models are needed for early warning systems
as dengue grows worldwide, but that there is no "silver bullet" for
control and prevention.
Buckee says the same approach could be applied in other places.
"Pakistan is an archetype of a lot of emerging places ... that are on
the edge of endemic transmission," she says. The researchers say they
have been looking to apply the same approach to other Asian countries
and to diseases such as measles, malaria and influenza.
- SciDevNet
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