 |
|
March 30, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 10S
 |
| MALARIA-FREE FUTURE? From left, back row, Tahir Akbar, Mayuri Panditrao and Prasanth Jeevan during their research trip to India last summer.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY PRASANTH JEEVAN
|
Engineer helps study system for predicting malaria outbreaks in India
Malaria has long plagued India. According to the World
Health Organization, an estimated one to two million cases of malaria
are confirmed every year. Even worse, 95 percent of the population
lives in at-risk areas. The government faces an overwhelming challenge
of protecting its population using limited resources.
When an outbreak occurs, it might take weeks for officials to distribute
mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs or spray insecticides. But what if
a software tool could predict outbreaks before they occur or at least
pinpoint high-risk areas? Then the government could assign its resources
most efficiently, implement preventive measures and save lives.
Three Berkeley graduate students have been studying just that. One
of them is EECS graduate student Prasanth Jeevan. He got involved in
the project, entitled “GIS to Predict Malaria Outbreaks,” after
meeting Public Policy graduate student Tahir Akbar at a grad mixer
in the fall of 2005. “Berkeley has this reputation for going
to developing countries and doing innovative things to help others,
and here this opportunity fell into my lap,” Jeevan says. “I’d
be stupid not to take it. I feel this is a large part of what Berkeley is about.”
Jeevan, who is from southern India, joined Akbar and Public Health
graduate student Mayuri Panditrao in applying for a MOT-UNIDO Bridging
the Divide Fellowship, which sponsors interdisciplinary graduate student
research in developing countries. The team wanted to study the feasibility
of using a geographic information system (GIS) to predict outbreaks.
GIS is a software tool that analyzes georeferenced data such as altitude
and temperature, as well as public health data, to identify correlations
between environmental factors and disease patterns in order to predict
trends.
After receiving a 2006 fellowship, the team traveled to northern India
last May to interview malaria experts, software makers, public health
and government officials. After six hot weeks in the field, they came
home to write their recommendations: Yes, GIS is feasible, but with
caveats. Better infrastructures must be in place to provide the digital
data to make GIS the truly fast and accurate tool it needs to be, and
a pilot test must be conducted. But this summer, attendees at the Berkeley-UNIDO
Bridging the Divide Conference will learn of the team’s hopeful
findings in a final report.
“I couldn’t approach this project in the typical hard-core engineering
style,” Jeevan says, looking back. “The fact is, it wasn’t
a pure EECS/ engineering problem, and in some ways, the technology
was already out there. What is successful in the United States has
its own challenges in a developing country. You have to make it work
in a unique political, social and economic environment, and you have
to figure out who can help you with that. And that’s where Mayuri
and Tahir came in as well as the people we worked with in India. It
wasn’t a one-man show at all.”
For more information, go to bigideas.berkeley.edu/node/48.
|
|