An Emerging Infectious Disease Surveillance Platform for the 21st Century

Abstract

Current vector surveillance programs are insufficient for coping with the emerging infectious disease crisis. In particular, current practices do not deploy sufficient information technology (IT) tools to generate actionable insights that can inform interventions and contain and mitigate the spread of vector-borne diseases. VectorAnalytica has developed a highly configurable and adaptable IT platform that imports, harmonizes, and integrates a range of data sources. The state-of-the-art backend development allows users to fully appreciate and understand the complexity of infectious disease dynamics without having to resort to additional statistical and GIS software packages. The platform yields actionable insights into outbreak patterns of vector-borne diseases that could not have been obtained without integrating pertinent contextual information at a granular spatiotemporal scale. Such integration empowers local scientists to participate actively in an ongoing manner in protecting their communities. The platform can also empower regional and national scientists and other scholars and agencies by providing them with a shared platform through which they can access continuously updated real-time data with which to formulate, validate, and update new dynamic forecasting and simulating models that support timely and appropriate decision-making and interventions on a wide range of scales. VectorAnalytica’s effectiveness is described in three cases studies for which integrating and visualizing unexpected but pertinent variables (in addition to those traditionally studied for vector disease monitoring and management) yielded critical information about significant correlations between weather variables and disease incidence, and between complaints to local call centers, weather conditions, and emergent vector hotspots.