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Research

Current malaria elimination targets must withstand a colossal challenge-resistance to the current gold standard antimalarial drug, namely artemisinin derivatives. If artemisinin resistance significantly expands to Africa or India, cases and malaria-related deaths are set to increase substantially.

Research

Consistent with the principles of differential privacy protection, the Australian Bureau of Statistics artificially perturbs all count data from the Australian Census prior to its release to researchers through the TableBuilder platform. This perturbation involves the addition of random noise to every non-zero cell count followed by the suppression of small values to zero.

Research

Testing and treating symptomatic malaria cases is crucial for case management, but it may also prevent future illness by reducing mean infection duration. Measuring the impact of effective treatment on burden and transmission via field studies or routine surveillance systems is difficult and potentially unethical. This project uses mathematical modeling to explore how increasing treatment of symptomatic cases impacts malaria prevalence and incidence. 

Research

Pathogen strain diversity is an important driver of the trajectory of epidemics. The role of bioclimatic factors on the spatial distribution of dengue virus serotypes has, however, not been previously studied. Hence, we developed municipality-scale environmental suitability maps for the four dengue virus serotypes using maximum entropy modeling.

Research

Globally, non-communicable diseases (NCD) kill about 40 million people annually, with about three-quarters of the deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. This study was carried out to determine the patterns, trends, and causes of in-hospital non-communicable disease (NCD) and injury deaths in Tanzania from 2006-2015.

Research

Rotavirus causes substantial morbidity and mortality every year, particularly among under-five children. Despite Rotavirus immunization preventing severe diarrheal disease in children, the vaccination coverage remains inadequate in many African countries including Ethiopia.

Research

Since 2004, malaria transmission on Bioko Island has declined significantly as a result of the scaling-up of control interventions. The aim of eliminating malaria from the Island remains elusive, however, underscoring the need to adapt control to the local context. Understanding the factors driving the risk of malaria infection is critical to inform optimal suits of interventions in this adaptive approach.

Research

Vector mosquito biting intensity is an important measure to understand malaria transmission. Human landing catch (HLC) is an effective but labour-intensive, expensive, and potentially hazardous entomological surveillance tool. The Centres for Disease Control light trap (CDC-LT) and the human decoy trap (HDT) are exposure-free alternatives.

Research

Towards the goal of malaria elimination on Hispaniola, the National Malaria Control Program of Haiti and its international partner organisations are conducting a campaign of interventions targeted to high-risk communities prioritised through evidence-based planning. Here we present a key piece of this planning: an up-to-date, fine-scale endemicity map and seasonality profile for Haiti informed by monthly case counts.

Research

Individual-based models have become important tools in the global battle against infectious diseases, yet model complexity can make calibration to biological and epidemiological data challenging. We propose using a Bayesian optimization framework employing Gaussian process or machine learning emulator functions to calibrate a complex malaria transmission simulator.