如何用手机数据阻止疟疾传播？

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如何用手机数据阻止疟疾传播？

未知数据让人们有更好的方法应对每年杀死一百万人的疾病。

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疟疾接触：利用收集数据追踪人群（例如这位在内罗比汽车站用手机的人），可以帮助确认哪里需要疟疾控制计划的关注。（图片来源：Alex Kamweru）

研究人员已经利用手机位置数据，精确地在肯尼亚为人类旅行对疟疾的扩散进行绘图。这是把手机数据作为传染病学工具的规模最大的一次研究。

这项研究捕捉了将近1千5百万匿名肯尼亚人在2008年6月到2009年6月间的旅行习惯。他们的旅行情况被11920个手机发射塔搜集到。这些数据随后被与健康机构记录的疟疾发生情况进行了比对。

研究结果表明，疟疾在这段时间的爆发始于肯尼亚的维多利亚湖区，并向东扩散到首都内罗毕。哈佛大学公共健康学院（Harvard School of Public Health）的传染病学家卡洛琳•巴基（Caroline Buckee）表示，这说明健康部门可以把精力放在湖区，以预防疾病的传播，她也是发表在10月11日《科学》杂志上的论文作者。

她还说：“如果你准备尝试消灭疟疾，你真的需要准确地从大多数感染开始的地方进行干预。否则的话你就不会在感染的发生地解决问题。”

传播疟原虫的是蚊子。但是感染的人（尤其是那些对疾病免疫并在旅行的时候没有感觉到症状的人）也能大范围地扩散疾病，蚊子咬了他们会继续咬别人。

参与此研究的机构（包括卡耐基梅隆大学，Carnegie Mellon University和肯尼亚医学研究所，Kenya Medical Research Institue）构建了疟原虫从感染源和人们发病的感染地点之间传播的地图。研究人员可以推断出某个社区的住户感染的概率，也可以推断出每天到易发疟疾地点访客被感染的概率。

这项研究提供了一个新的角度，让手机改进肯尼亚的公共健康。创业公司和NGO也在编写大量的应用和服务，可以通过手机提供医学信息和提醒。（see Kenya’s Startup Boom）

巴基说，研究人员仍然在和肯尼亚健康部合作，制定行动计划。不过一些大方向的策略可能已经有了。研究可以让数据使用决定疟疾控制计划的地点，通过短信给去高危地区的人们发送警告。

尽管已经知道手机有能力为人类移动绘图，并搜集是否得病的信息，《科学》上的这篇论文把手机当作传染病研究工具的最大的一项研究。巴基说，“据我所知，第一次有这么大量而清晰的数据被用于传染病传播的研究，并可得出传播和风险的因素。”

贾斯丁•科恩（Justin Cohen）是克林顿健康倡议组织(Clinton Health Access Initiative)的疟疾高级技术顾问。克林顿健康倡议组织是比尔•克林顿（Bill Clinton）总统成立的基金。科恩说，人类的旅行是疟疾扩散的关键因素，但在世界的很多地方，旅行的模式没有被很好地理解。“描述实际旅行模式也就成了重要的一步，”他说。

例如，当桑给巴尔岛（island of Zanzibar）在过去几十年中减少了疟疾发病率的时候，阿曼的疟疾案例竟然也大大减少了，这很让吃惊。科恩说，原来，间隔很远的区域也有很强的迁徙网络。类似地，尽管维多利亚湖区长期以来一直被认为是肯尼亚疟疾的高发地，“但它是其他区域疟疾的来源就不那么明显了。生活在那里的人们相当贫困，而且肯尼亚的种族分隔让人们去国家其他区域旅行的频率也不清楚。”

内森•伊格尔（Nathan Eagle）是研究的共同作者，也是哈佛公共健康学院的兼职助理教授（他也是Buckee的爱人）。Eagle说这个项目是一个例子，可以说明在发展中国家，手机的“大数据”可以用来做什么。

伊格尔正研究一个项目，通过人们手机购买记录建立一个信用历史，用手机购买说明他们有固定的工资。“我们可以做很多事，比如寻早在贫民窟中投资基础设施的地点；再比如当只有某个人移动和利用手机交易记录的时候，可以建立信用历史，”他说。“我的研究努力让人们行为产生的数据反过来改进哪些产生数据人们的生活。”

翻译 汤厚龙

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　　How Cell-Phone Data Could Slow the Spread of Malaria
　　Location data suggests a better way to fight a disease that kills a million people a year.
　　3 comments
　　
　　David Talbot
　　Thursday, October 11, 2012
　　Malaria contacts: Tracking people using data from cell phones, like this one used by a man at a Nairobi bus station, can help determine where to focus malaria-control programs.Alex Kamweru
　　Researchers have mapped precisely how human travel affects the spread of malaria in Kenya by using cell-phone location data. The effort is the largest ever to use cell-phone data as an epidemiological tool.
　　The study captured the anonymized travel habits of nearly 15 million Kenyans between June 2008 and June 2009. Their movements were gleaned from 11,920 cell towers. The data was then mapped against the incidence of malaria as recorded by health officials.
　　The results made clear that malaria outbreaks during that period began in Kenya's Lake Victoria region and spread east toward the capital of Nairobi. This suggests that health officials could avert transmissions by focusing their efforts in the lake region, says Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study, which is being published today in the journal Science.
　　
　　
　　
　　"If you are going to try and eliminate malaria, you've really got to target interventions where most infections originate," she says. "Otherwise, you are mopping up problems in areas where the infections didn't originate."
　　Mosquitoes spread the malaria parasite. But infected people—particularly those who are immune and travel without feeling symptoms—can spread the disease widely if they're later bitten by mosquitoes that go on to bite other people. Malaria kills about a million people each year, most of them children under age five in sub-Saharan Africa.
　　Researchers at several participating institutions—including Carnegie Mellon University and the Kenya Medical Research Institute—built maps of parasite movements between sources of infections and areas where people got sick. They could infer the probability that residents in particular communities would become infected, and the daily probability that visitors to malaria-prone areas would become infected.
　　The study provides a new angle on how to use cell phones to improve public health in Kenya. Startups and NGOs are also building a variety of apps and services to provide medical information and reminders through cell phones (see "Kenya's Startup Boom").
　　Buckee says the researchers are still working with Kenya's Health Ministry to devise action plans, but several general strategies are possible. As well as using the data to decide where to focus malaria control programs, the research could result in programs to send warnings via text message to people traveling to high-risk areas.
　　While cell phones are understood to have power to map human movements and also to glean whether people are sick (see "An App That Looks for Signs of Sickness"), the Science study was the largest ever attempted to use cell phones as an epidemiological tool. "To my knowledge, this is the first time that this resolution of data, and this amount of data, has even been used with infectious disease prevalence to map out these mobility and risk factors," Buckee says.
　　Justin Cohen, senior technical advisor for malaria to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, a foundation started by former President Bill Clinton, says human travel is a key factor in the spread of malaria, but travel patterns are not well understood in many parts of the world. "Describing the actual movement patterns is thus an important step," he says.
　　When the island of Zanzibar reduced malaria over recent decades, for example, a big surprise was that Oman also saw a big drop in cases. It turned out that the widely separated regions had strong migration networks, Cohen says. Similarly, while it's long been known that Lake Victoria is a very malarial part of Kenya, "the idea that it's a source of malaria for other regions is not self-evident. People are quite poor there, and ethnic divisions in Kenya mean that it's not clear how often people would travel to visit other parts of the country."
　　Nathan Eagle, a coauthor of the study who is an adjunct assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health (and Buckee's spouse), says the project is an example of what can be done with cell phone "big data" in the developing world.
Eagle is working on a project to develop a credit history using a person's record of purchases, including of airtime, on mobile phones—activity that implies they have income at regular intervals. "There are lots of things that can be done—anything from figuring out where to invest infrastructure in slums, to bootstrapping a credit history when there is no other record about someone's behavior than movements and transactions they have made on phones," he says. "My research agenda is about trying to repurpose all this data being generated in the wake of human behavior in a way that improves the lives of people who are generating that data."

smuzhousha

很有意思的研究.让人觉得在信息的海洋里,人无所遁形.如此科技发展是人类之幸还是祸?

zhuchengwen

数据让人类进步!!!!!!!!