SFI External Professor Mercedes Pascual and colleagues have created a model that can forecast cholera outbreaks nearly a year before they happen in Bangladesh, giving public health officials more time to prepare.
Pascual, a theoretical ecologist at University of Michigan, and her collaborators have been studying patterns of cholera epidemics in Dhaka, the capital megacity of Bangladesh that is home to 14 million people.
Previous models have used data aggregated at the city level, whose predictions of up to a month in advance were too short-term for adequate preparations. The new model incorporates data on both year-to-year climate variability and the spatial location of cholera cases at the district level.
By considering climate variability linked to the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and analyzing data at a more detailed spatial level, the team found evidence for a climate-sensitive urban core in Dhaka that acts to propagate cholera risk to the rest of the city and demonstrated they can predict cholera outbreaks up to 11 months before they hit.
"This enables us to provide early warnings that are useful because they can help hospitals prepare for the effective treatment of large numbers of people," Pascual says in a University of Michigan press release posted in R&D Mag.
Read the R&D Magazine article (January 23, 2012)
Read the PNAS paper (January 23, 2012)
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