There is an old tradition of investigating the outbreak of a disease that spreads in the population. One example is the well-known outbreak of cholera in London in 1854. Visit http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump.html
The Internet and social media can now do a lot to simplify the effort of investigating rabies outbreaks. A rabid dog rarely bites one person and stops. Fifty years ago my uncle, a rural doctor, was called out because his pet dog had gone rabid and had bitten seven persons. He went out to catch and tie down the animal. The dog bit him as well during this process, and he died a month later despite being given rabies vaccine.
The presence of a rabid dog in a locality is an indication that several other dogs in that area could be infected too. We need modern tools to quickly collate information on problem spots (I call them rabies hotspots) so that public health authorities can reduce the spread of the disease. I think that there are challenges to professionals in many fields to develop ways of collating this information. Multi-disciplinary collaboration will surely help. I would like to see computer science researchers develop tools to help public health authorities. There is a chance that we could eliminate rabies by the year 2020. Anyone who can contribute to this effort should be proud of participating in the battle – the disease currently kills 70,000 people per year. An article on my blog discusses this issue in more detail. Visit
http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/
http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/
Dear Dr Ramani,
I very much agree with your point of view and that we are in an exciting time, with technology transforming the way in which epidemiological data can be gathered and analysed remotely and in real time. Mission Rabies has been working with smartphones to record the details and GPS of every dog vaccinated on mass vaccination drives since 2013. Through this experience we developed a tailor made app to overcome specific operational challenges around dog vaccination on a large scale and the technology has transformed our methods through the two-way flow of data, with over 250,000 dogs recorded on the system so far. The app also enables us to remotely record the location of reported rabid dog and register the names and phone numbers of people exposed. Once the dog has been tested for rabies, the results are fed directly back to those people recorded on the register.
This is just one example of how mobile technology can be used to improve the efficiency with which mass disease control interventions are conducted and to improve monitoring and evaluation of large scale projects.
We have just published our first paper referring to some of these methods used in Ranchi, Jharkhand: http://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-015-1320-2
We are looking forward to continuing to develop this work in 2016 in the countries worst affected by rabies. If you have any questions or comments about our work please get in touch and I would be interested to discuss your ideas further.
Kind regards,
Andy
www.missionrabies.com
Thanks, Andy. I have recently started following news from Missionrabies. I salute your organization.
Ramani
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