Es increíble ver que la tecnología a veces ofrece usos y beneficios totalmente ajenos a fines comerciales. Esta nota cuenta la historia de como unos investigadores de Harvard usaron la red de celulares de Kenia para rastrear de qué manera se está esparciendo la Malaria en este país, y combatirla mejor atacando preventivamente sus principales rutas.
Algo similar tambien pasó con el brote colera que hubo en Haití…
Cellphones are popping up all over in health care these days. They’re monitoring ourblood sugar, tracking the flu season and even mapping the junk food we eat at night.
But compared to a study just published in Science, these crowdsourcing tools look like small potatoes.
Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health tracked the texts and calls from nearly 15 million cellphones in Kenya for an entire year and then used the data to make a map for how malaria spreads around the Texas-sized country. The results were unexpected.
The roads to and from the capital city, Nairobi, are the most heavily traveled, yet they aren’t the most important for spreading the disease throughout the country.
Instead, regional routes around Lake Victoria serve as the major disease corridors for the parasite. And, towns along the routes are hot spots for transmitting malaria to the rest of the country.
The data also confirm what a few epidemiologists had feared: Malaria seems to be getting into some African megacities, like Nairobi.
Malaria doesn’t typically occur in large cities because mosquitoes don’t thrive there. “But some studies suggest that mosquitoes are adapting to the city," Douglas Fuller, a geographer at the University of Miami, tells Shots. "This study shows you where Nairobi is getting its malaria.”
To curb malaria throughout Kenya, the disease-travel map points out precise areas for concentrating malaria control efforts and suggests places where stopping malaria won’t have a big impact…
http://n.pr/R8hNA0
Tracking malaria
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