ISLAMABAD: A new and innovative system has been developed to help forecast the dengue fever outbreak by simply analysing the calling behavior of citizens to a public-health hotline.
This telephone-based disease surveillance system can forecast two to three weeks ahead of time the outbreaks of dengue fever with intra-city granularity. Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus that infects up to 400,000 people each year.
The forecasting system has been developed by the researchers from New York University and University of Washington in the United States and Information Technology University and Punjab Information Technology Board in Pakistan.
Co-author Fahad Pervaiz, who is doctoral student in computer science and engineering, has said that the developing world faces challenges in tackling major outbreaks due to limited resources. He added that this new technique would equip the public officials with tools to inform them about where to apply these resources in advance and hopefully save millions of lives.
The system measures number of calls received at a health hotline facility in Lahore to forecast number of dengue cases at a block-by-block level. Collection of the disease surveillance data traditionally requires a huge infrastructure to gather and analyse disease incidence data from all the healthcare facilities in a country or region. The primary appeal for this new system is its capability to closely monitor disease activity by merely analysing citizen’s calls on a public-health hotline.
Another author Nabeel Abdur Rehman, also a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, said that early warning systems in the past have only generated alerts of disease outbreaks on a city or state level. He said that their goal was to develop a system that could pinpoint a location inside a city where a disease’s activity has increased so the government could perform targeted containment of the disease.
The efforts to develop the system started in the aftermath of the 2011 dengue outbreaks in Pakistan which infected over 21,000 people and took 350 lives. Because there is no known cure or vaccine for treating different stages of dengue fever, most public health efforts focus on prevention through disease surveillance and vector control methods such as eliminating the carriers of a particular disease, such as mosquitoes.
The team used more than 300,000 calls to the health hotline, which was set up in aftermath of the 2011 outbreaks, to forecast the number of dengue cases across the city and at a block-by-block level over a period of two years. The researchers then matched their predictions with the actual number of cases reported in public hospitals.
The results showed a high level of accuracy for the model’s predictions: the system not only flagged an outbreak, but also made an accurate forecast of both the number of patients and their locations two to three weeks ahead of time.
