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Malaria is a focal disease and more localized in low endemic areas. The disease is increasingly becoming a concern in urban areas in most sub-Saharan African countries. The growing threats of Anopheles stephensi and insecticide resistance magnify this concern and hamper elimination efforts. It is, therefore, imperative to identify areas, within urban settings, of high-risk of malaria to help better target interventions.
Nearly 170 years ago a British doctor applied geospatial mapping to identify the source of a cholera outbreak in central London. Using a street map to plot the location of the homes of the sick, Dr John Snow was able to pinpoint a ‘ground zero’ for the outbreak – a contaminated water pump.
New research highlights the long-term physical health problems faced by people who survive drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) .
Country-level estimates can mask local geographic variations in progress toward achieving World Health Organization's End TB targets. This study aimed to identify spatial variations in progress toward achieving the TB incidence reduction target at a district level in Ethiopia.
Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious cause of death globally, with approximately three million cases remaining undetected, thereby contributing to community transmission. Understanding the spatial distribution of undetected TB in high-burden settings is critical for designing and implementing geographically targeted interventions for early detection and control.
Disease spreading models such as the ubiquitous SIS compartmental model and its numerous variants are widely used to understand and predict the behavior of a given epidemic or information diffusion process. A common approach to imbue more realism to the spreading process is to constrain simulations to a network structure, where connected nodes update their disease state based on pairwise interactions along the edges of their local neighborhood.
Differential exposure and effect of malaria results from blends of biophysical, geospatial, and social determinants of health (SDoH). Likewise, effective policies and programmatic interventions against malaria must consider the complex interaction of social and spatial factors, while comprehensive health promotion approaches must simultaneously tackle SDoH and the ecological dimensions that drive malaria.
Hepatitis B (HBV) prevalence is very high in pregnant women in the Dolpa district of Nepal, a region characterised by a remote geographic landscape and low vaccination coverage. Using mathematical modelling, we evaluated the impact of third-trimester tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) prophylaxis on HBV burden and estimated the time required to achieve HBV elimination in Dolpa.
Worldwide, tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading cause of death from infectious diseases. Africa is the second most-affected region, accounting for a quarter of the global TB burden, but there is limited evidence whether there is subnational variation of TB prevalence across the continent. Therefore, this study aimed to estimate sub-national and local TB prevalence across Africa.
Soil-Transmitted Helminth (STH) infections are a significant health issue in the Western Pacific Region (WPR). This study aims to produce high-resolution spatial prediction STH prevalence maps for the WPR.