The mosquito-borne disease dengue usually causes only flu-like symptoms but it can be lethal, especially to children. “My youngest is bitten constantly,” says Steven Barnes, who lives in Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, a megacity in the grip of an outbreak. “It would be really easy for her to get infected.”
Barnes isn’t just slapping on repellent and spraying bedrooms to keep mosquitos at bay. He has created an app called Fight Dengue that tells users if anyone nearby has the disease. If so, they know they should take extra precautions to avoid being bitten.
Barnes built the app for personal use, but it has gathered 400 users since he made it freely available. He has created another app called Fight Zika to track the disease currently sweeping through South America, and plans to create one for malaria.
Currently, the apps alert people to nearby cases using government data or self-reporting. But Barnes wants to make them a more powerful tool for preventing disease by using information about where people have been to pinpoint where people are getting infected. To do that, he’s calling on Google to help.
Pools of disease
Speaking via a video link to a conferenceon neglected tropical diseases in London last week, he put up a slide appealing directly to the tech giant. “Dear Google,” the slide read. “Can we have an API please? Allow the user to give access to the last 15 days of location data upon infection. Anonymously. We’ll do the rest.”
Dengue and Zika spread after a mosquito feeds on blood from someone infected with one of the viruses. After a few days incubation, the mosquito will then pass the virus on to anyone she bites in the remaining weeks of her life.
The mosquitoes that carry these viruses don’t usually fly more than a few hundred yards. So if one of your neighbours gets dengue, your risk of getting the disease is much higher than if the nearest case is a kilometre or two away. A few months ago, something happened that gave Barnes a new idea for tracking the disease and the insects that spread it.
Three of his wife’s friends came down with dengue at the same time. They all lived in different parts of Kuala Lumpur, but had recently met in a park.
It seemed likely that the park was the point of infection. Barnes, who runs his own software consultancy company, realised that if his apps could track where large numbers of people had been before getting infected, then overlay their location histories, the major mosquito hotspots would emerge from the data.
Search and destroy
People living nearby could then take extra precautions, and they or local authorities could and focus on killing mosquitoes there rather than spraying indiscriminately. “Once you find the source, you don’t need to blindly foganymore,” Barnes says.
The idea is that people who have just come down with dengue would download the app and anonymously share their location data for the past 15 days. The trouble is that while Google does keep a history of its customers’ locations, it doesn’t offer any way for third-party apps to request access.
Would Google ever consider letting its users opt-in to sharing their location histories? Google didn’t say when New Scientist asked, but it has previously saidit is interested in helping the fight against Zika.
Even if Google does play ball, success will depend on lots of infected people sharing their data. But it would be in people’s interests to do so, not just to protect family and friends, but because coming down with one strain of dengue doesn’t stop you getting the other four strains, so catching it is still something you need to avoid. The terrible pain these later infections can cause give the disease its nickname, “breakbone fever”.
No comments:
Post a Comment