Big data can stop malaria outbreaks before they start

Big data can stop malaria outbreaks before they start

June 23 2020
Website :
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48581317

Student Name : Joyce Chang 張可薔

Student ID : D0740800

    A study in Bangladesh has found that using data from mobile phone networks to track the movement of people across the country can help predict where outbreaks of diseases such as malaria are likely to occur, enabling health authorities to do preventions just I time. Malaria kills more than 400,000 people globally each year while most of them are children.

    Although in many areas of Bangladesh the number of people falling ill or dying from the malaria has dropped dramatically in recent years, it remains a persistent problem.

    But now help is at hand from an unexpected source: the mobile phones of millions of Bangladeshis. It is part of a project based in the Chittagong region that for several years has been anonymously tracking the movements of people in the area using the data from their mobiles.The big data provides an accurate picture of where they've travelled to in the region and beyond, making it possible to predict where malaria outbreaks are likely to occur.

    Thousands of kilometers away in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, the phone company Telenor collates all the anonymous data and sends it to be analyzed by academics at Harvard School of Public Health and a research unit in Thailand run by specialists from Oxford and Mahidol universities.

    The different types of data, including medical information provided by the Bangladesh ministry of health, are used to create risk maps indicating the likely locations of malaria outbreaks so the local health authorities can then be warned to take preventative action, including spraying insecticides and stockpiling bed nets and medicines to protect the population from the disease.

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