Researchers from Harvard state that with the help of cell phones they were able to track the spread malaria in Kenya.
With the help of cell phones and text messages from 15 million phones, researchers from Harvard were able to track the spread of malaria in Kenya.
"Before mobile phones, we had proxies for human travel, like road networks, census data and small-scale GPS studies," said study author Caroline Buckee, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "But now that mobile phones have spread throughout the world, we can start using these massive amounts of data to quantify human movements on a larger scale and couple this data with knowledge of infection risk."
Buckee and his team used mobile phone records from June 2008 and June 2009 to track how long and from where people were texting. They studied these numbers of 15 million Kenyan mobile phone subscribers. The results which were published Thursday in the journal Science stated that malaria transmission within Kenya is dominated by travel from Lake Victoria on the country's western edge to the more central capital city of Nairobi.
"How travelers acquire malaria elsewhere and bring it home has been mostly surmised from expert knowledge and judgment," said Dr. William Schaffner, professor and chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. "Here we've used this unrelated cell phone technology.
"I think it is so neat and extraordinarily imaginative. It has me bouncing up and down in my chair with excitement. I suspect that some people will get antsy about big brother following you," he said, alluding to the privacy concerns that accompany mobile technology.
"I'm more excited about the possibilities to prevent serious disease."
Buckee believes that cell phone technology could help change the face of malaria control. People travelling to malaria hotspots could be warned against the same through text messages and given advice on insecticides, bed nets, medications and mosquito-habitat removal.
"They can't screen and treat everyone," she said. "[Mobile phones] could be really powerful tools for targeting resources with very practical applications."
