Malaria and land use: a spatial and temporal risk analysis in Southern Sri Lanka

Malaria / Waterborne diseases / Disease vectors / Land use / Water use / GIS / Statistical analysis / Risks / Mapping / Public health / Sri Lanka / Uda Walawe / Thanamalvila / Embilipitiya

Implementing a Public Private Partnership Model for Managing Urban Health in Ahmedabad

Governments in many developing countries acknowledge they are facing difficulties in their attempt to meet the basic health needs of their populations. They rely on contracting out to private (for-profit and not-for-profit) organizations as a strategy to meet the needs of underserved populations. For the most part, the public sector chooses to contract out primary healthcare services to the private sector to expand access, increase the availability of medicines and medical supplies, and improve the quality of care. In both urban and rural settings, private for-profit and non-profit health service providers serve both the rich and the poor. Communities often recognize private sector healthcare providers to be more responsive to their healthcare needs and preferences in terms of services available, suitable timings and geographical access etc. Private sector has always played a significant role in the delivery of health services in developing countries. Public-private-partnership (PPP) is an approach under which services are delivered by the private sector, while the responsibility for providing the resources rests with the government. Establishing a PPP requires a legal framework acceptable to all the partners, clarity on the commitment of resources, roles and responsibilities of each partner, as well as accountability to provide a given set of services at a desired level of quality and affordable user charges. Formalizing such an arrangement between partners requires conceptualising a framework for Public Private Partnership (PPP) to manage the delivery of health services. In this paper, we describe the design, development and implementation of a PPP for managing urban health services in Ahmedabad city, Gujarat. Our model has succeeded in bringing together compatible public and private partners to plan and deliver quality healthcare services to meet the community needs of Vasna ward, in Ahmedabad. The new Vasna Urban Health centre was inaugurated on July 23, by the Chief Minister of Guajarat. This new centre now serves about 120 outpatients everyday as against an average of 10 outpatients daily earlier.

Malaria mosquito resistance to agricultural insecticides: risk area mapping in Thailand

Malaria / Disease vectors / Waterborne diseases / Irrigated farming / Pest control / Insecticides / Public health / Risks / Mapping / GIS / Land use / Thailand / Chiang Mai / Mae Hong Son / Tak / Kanchanaburi

Use of Google Earth™ to Strengthen Public Health Capacity and Facilitate Management of Vector-Borne Diseases in Resource-Poor Environments

Novel, inexpensive solutions are needed for improved management of vector-borne and other diseases in resource-poor environments. Emerging free software providing access to satellite imagery and simple editing tools (e.g. Google Earth™) complement existing geographic information system (GIS) software and provide new opportunities for: (i) strengthening overall public health capacity through development of information for city infrastructures; and (ii) display of public health data directly on an image of the physical environment. Collaborators include: Saul Lozano-Fuentes, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Darwin Elizondo-Quiroga, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Jose Arturo Farfan-Ale, Laboratorio de Arbovirologia, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Maria Alba Loroño-Pino, Laboratorio de Arbovirologia, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Julian Garcia-Rejon, Laboratorio de Arbovirologia, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Salvador Gomez-Carro, Servicios de Salud de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Victor Lira-Zumbardo, Servicios de Salud de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Rosario Najera-Vazquez, Servicios de Salud de Yucatan, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; Ildefonso Fernandez-Salas, Laboratorio de Entomología Medica, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico; Joaquin Calderon-Martinez, Servicios Estatales de Salud de Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico; Marco Dominguez-Galera, Servicios Estatales de Salud de Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico; Pedro Mis-Avila, Servicios Estatales de Salud de Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico; Natashia Morris, Malaria Research Programme, Medical Research Council, Durban, South Africa; Michael Coleman, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, England; Chester G Moore, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; Barry J Beaty, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA; and Lars Eisen, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, US

Mosquitoes: The Long-term Effects of Malaria Eradication in India

We examine the effects of malaria on educational attainment and income by exploiting geographic variation in malaria prevalence in India prior to a nationwide eradication program in the 1950s. We find that the program led to modest increases in income for prime age men. This finding is robust to using very localized sources of geographic variation and to instrumenting for pre-eradication prevalence with climate factors. We do not observe improvements in income for women, suggesting that observed effects are likely driven by increased labor market productivity. We find no evidence of increased educational attainment for men, and mixed evidence for women.

GeoFog4Health: a fog-based SDI framework for geospatial health big data analysis

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is an important framework for sharing geospatial big data using the web. Integration of SDI with cloud computing led to emergence of Cloud-SDI as a tool for transmission, processing and analysis of geospatial data. Fog computing is a paradigm where embedded computers are employed to increase the throughput and reduce latency at the edge of the network. In this study, we developed and evaluated a Fog-based SDI framework named GeoFog4Health for mining analytics from geo-health big data. We built prototypes using Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi for studying the comparative performance. We conducted a case study on Malaria vector-borne disease positive maps of Maharastra state in India. The proposed framework had provision of lossless data compression for reduced data transfer. Also, overlay analysis of geospatial data was implemented. In addition, we discussed energy savings, cost analysis and scalability of the proposed framework with respect to efficient data processing. We compared the performance of the proposed framework with the state-of-the-art Cloud-SDI in terms of analysis time. Results and discussions showed the efficacy of the proposed system for enhanced analysis of geo-health big data generated from a variety of sensing frameworks

Endemic diseases and agricultural productivity: Challenges and policy response

Contrary to Asian countries, the agricultural sector in Africa had not benefited from the green revolution success. After a long time of disinterest in the agriculture sector in Africa, several voices arise now in favour of greater efforts towards this sector. Several studies tend to show the crucial role of agriculture in African countries’ growth and highlight the huge need of increasing the productivity in this sector. If increase in agriculture productivity requires both an expansion of irrigated areas and the adoption of high yield varieties, those innovations and their high development could be the source of negative health (and environmental) effects. Using a mega-analysis, this paper highlights first the links between health, disease and development and then agricultural productivity. The literature review shows that the negative effect of bad health was not systematically checked, and that the intensity of this effect depends of the disease, but also of the work productivity and the existence or not of a coping process. The second part of the paper focused on the development of high intensive agriculture as a risk factor for farmers’ and rural inhabitants’ health. This survey shows that whether irrigation and fertilizer and pest intensive use could be considered as highly health (and environmental) risk factors, appropriate control measures (such as for examples systematic maintenance of irrigation canals, alternate wetting and drying of irrigated fields or integrated pest management) considerably reduce this risk, while at the same time, increase the agriculture productivity.agriculture, productivity, endemic disease, health risk factor, Africa

Malaria in Sri Lanka: Current knowledge on transmission and control

Malaria / Disease vectors / Waterborne diseases / Environmental effects / Public health / Economic impact / Social impact / Sri Lanka

Alternate wet/dry irrigation in rice cultivation: a practical way to save water and control malaria and Japanese encephalitis?

Water management / Water scarcity / Water use efficiency / Water conservation / Irrigated farming / Waterborne diseases / Rice / Malaria / Disease vectors / Productivity / Flood irrigation / Environmental control / Climate / China / East Africa / India / Indonesia / Japan / Philippines / Portugal / USA

Endemic diseases and agricultural productivity: Challenges and policy response

Contrary to Asian countries, the agricultural sector in Africa had not benefited from the green revolution success. After a long time of disinterest in the agriculture sector in Africa, several voices arise now in favour of greater efforts towards this sector. Several studies tend to show the crucial role of agriculture in African countries' growth and highlight the huge need of increasing the productivity in this sector. If increase in agriculture productivity requires both an expansion of irrigated areas and the adoption of high yield varieties, those innovations and their high development could be the source of negative health (and environmental) effects. Using a mega-analysis, this paper highlights first the links between health, disease and development and then agricultural productivity. The literature review shows that the negative effect of bad health was not systematically checked, and that the intensity of this effect depends of the disease, but also of the work productivity and the existence or not of a coping process. The second part of the paper focused on the development of high intensive agriculture as a risk factor for farmers' and rural inhabitants' health. This survey shows that whether irrigation and fertilizer and pest intensive use could be considered as highly health (and environmental) risk factors, appropriate control measures (such as for examples systematic maintenance of irrigation canals, alternate wetting and drying of irrigated fields or integrated pest management) considerably reduce this risk, while at the same time, increase the agriculture productivity.agriculture;productivity;endemic disease;health risk factor;Africa