© 2024 WUGA | University of Georgia
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Ecologists Detect Warning Signals of Malaria Outbreak

Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA taken in 2017

Researchers at the University of Georgia have demonstrated that disease surveillance data can be used to predict certain infectious disease outbreaks. The team detected early warning signals of a 1993 resurgence of malaria in Kenya in case reports from the roughly 10 years before the outbreak began. Their findings appear in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

The study was based on a theoretical framework for a disease forecasting system being developed by Distinguished Research Professor John Drake and his colleagues at the UGA Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases. It relies on the theory of “critical slowing down,” which predicts that telltale statistical patterns appear when a system under stress is nearing a tipping point—a point at which it changes irrevocably from one state to another.

“A tipping point is when something about the underlying properties of the system cause you to move from low, stable transmission to an epidemic,” said Mallory Harris, the paper’s lead author. “And we can detect that through increases in these really simple summary statistics like mean, variance—things that you learn about in high school,” she said.

Harris, at the time of the research an undergraduate Honors student, explained that the study’s findings could be applied to many, but not all, infectious disease systems. In particular, such an approach could work to provide an early warning about the resurgence of diseases already circulating within a population.

“It’s not a crystal ball,” said Harris. “We can’t say, ‘A traveler is going to come and they’re going to have this mystery illness and then it’s going to be transmitted to the rest of the population.’ But what we can potentially say is that there’s something going on under the surface—whether that be the development of drug resistance, in the case of this study, or some sort of slow environmental forcing—and it’s changing the properties of the system in a way that will make it more conducive to disease transmission,” she said.

Support for the study was provided by the UGA Odum School of Ecology, UGA Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U01GM110744. Besides Drake and Harris, the study’s other co-author is Simon Hay of the University of Washington.