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Dengue Surveillance and Control: One Health Case Study

Description

Pakistan being a subtropical region is highly susceptible to water-borne, air-borne and vector-borne infectious diseases (IDs). Each year, millions of its people are exposed to, and infected with, deadly pathogens including hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria, and now-a-days dengue fever (DF). Monitoring and response management to natural or man-made IDs is non-existent in the country due to lack of robust infrastructure for health surveillance. DF outbreaks in 2005-2011 alone resulted in more than 50,000 infections and about 1500 people lost their lives. The Government of Pakistan awarded C-SVAR, UET, Lahore, a research grant in order to develop a nation-wide one health surveillance (OHS) system-- integrating humans, animals, vectors, and environment to combat future epidemic threats. The developed system aims at producing high-impact health surveillance by addressing challenges posed by OHS concerning geographical coverage, timeliness and multi-source integration. It relies on collaboration among partnering agencies for effective counter-measures planning and response management.

We developed a visual-analytics environment (VAE) for OHS employing desktop-cum-mobile computing for real-time ID data acquisition, followed by GIS-based spatio-temporal disease spread modeling, with interactive visualization for counter-measure planning and response management. The system is built to integrate time-evolving (streaming) data from the following collaborators in Lahore: Institute of Public Health (IPH), Government Veterinary Hospital, Mayo Hospital, Ganga-Ram Hospital, and IPH entomological surveillance teams.

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