Mapping internal connectivity through human migration in malaria endemic countries

Abstract

Human mobility continues to increase in terms of volumes and reach, producing growing global connectivity. This connectivity hampers efforts to eliminate infectious diseases such as malaria through reintroductions of pathogens, and thus accounting for it becomes important in designing global, continental, regional, and national strategies. Recent works have shown that census-derived migration data provides a good proxy for internal connectivity, in terms of relative strengths of movement between administrative units, across temporal scales. To support global malaria eradication strategy efforts, here we describe the construction of an open access archive of estimated internal migration flows in endemic countries built through pooling of census microdata. These connectivity datasets, described here along with the approaches and methods used to create and validate them, are available both through the WorldPop website and the WorldPop Dataverse Repository.

Measuring mobility, disease connectivity and individual risk: a review of using mobile phone data and mHealth for travel medicine

“…A variety of models, integrating CDR-derived human mobility and malaria epidemiological and entomological data, have investigated the dynamics of human carriers to identify importation routes and locate transmission foci that contribute to malaria epidemiology for endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Mesoamerica and South-East Asia. 12,26,31,46,55,56,69,70 In these studies, spatial clusters of primary sinks and sources of parasite importation and their seasonal changes were disentangled, with the estimates of net export and import of travellers and infection risks by region. Using near real-time mobile-derived mobility data, this evidence can be rapidly updated and used to identify where active surveillance for both local and imported cases should be increased, which regions would benefit from coordinating efforts and how spatially progressive elimination plans can be designed.…”

Partitioning the influence of ecology across scales on parasite evolution

“…), more commonly, human movement spreads malaria parasites from high to low transmission zones (Tatem and Smith ; Sorichetta et al. ). All else being equal, a parasite strategy that maximizes the total number of hosts infected over a transmission season (i.e., the epidemic size) should also maximize the chances of being introduced into susceptible populations via infected host movement.…”

“…These last two proxies for parasite fitness reflect the fact that infectious humans or mosquitoes are required to introduce parasites into susceptible human populations. Although mosquitoes have occasionally spread malaria parasites over extreme distances (e.g., Velasco et al 2017), more commonly, human movement spreads malaria parasites from high to low transmission zones (Tatem and Smith 2010;Sorichetta et al 2016). All else being equal, a parasite strategy that maximizes the total number of hosts infected over a transmission season (i.e., the epidemic size) should also maximize the chances of being introduced into susceptible populations via infected host movement.…”

Eliminating malaria: following Sri Lanka’s lead

“…9 Regional platforms-including the Asia Pacific Leader's Malaria Alliance, which ushered in the adoption of a 2030 regional elimination goal, 10 and the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network, which provided a model for exchanging knowledge among national programmes-have been instrumental to elimination efforts. Recently, WHO launched a data sharing platform in the Greater Mekong subregion, and similar efforts are under way among the countries collaborating to eliminate malaria in southern Africa, the Elimination 8.…”