The Spread of Disease and Cell Phones

Identifying innovative monitoring systems and new ways to use existing data is the direction urban epidemiology is heading. The tracking of Malaria and Tuberculosis in Africa has proven not to be any different. The spread of large outbreak diseases, such as these, can be hard to contain especially since “by the time a case is diagnosed and treated, the next generation of cases has already been newly infected.” (University of Georgia’s College of Public Health, 2018). With the prevalence of cell phones and their accompanying data, there are new opportunities to track urban population’s exposure to infectious diseases.

Just this month, The National Institutes of Health awarded $2.6 million to a study being conducted by University of Georgia’s College of Public Health to use cell phone data to track Tuberculosis in Africa. The study did a preliminary investigation into 15 patients that had been infected and found that they tended to go to similar areas within the community. A parallel study was conducted earlier in the decade surrounding the spread of Malaria. These studies are important, because once they confirm the use of historical cell phone data to track diseases, then it can be used in real time to contain outbreaks.