Global Health Group publishes on malaria risk mapping

In elimination settings when cases are clustered, understanding exactly where the malaria risk is becomes an important part of a program’s ability to target resources and interventions. To address some of the challenges of finding these data, researchers from the Global Health Group’s Malaria Elimination Initiative recently published an article in the Malaria Journal entitled Fine-scale malaria risk mapping from routine aggregated case data (link is external). The paper documents a new method for creating malaria risk maps that uses health facility data and environmental and ecological variables to create malaria risk maps down to a scale of 1 km2.

The MEI’s Dr. Sturrock, who leads this research, was recently granted a Google Earth Engine Research Award (link is external) and will be working with Google Earth Engine engineers to develop a platform which will enable health workers and planners to create fine-scale maps on their own. These maps can help national malaria programs make evidence-based decisions to direct efforts towards identifying and responding to the last few malaria cases and ultimately eliminating malaria.