Malaria is one of the world's most deadly diseases, made even more deadly by the fact that it tends to affect mostly remote communities. This makes it difficult to track and control malaria outbreaks when they happen, resulting in more severe outbreaks and more victims. To solve this problem, a group of researchers have turned to an unlikely source: NASA satellites.
[...] NASA satellites can be used to track weather patterns, temperatures, and water levels in order to find the ponds and puddles where those mosquitoes breed. The researchers used NASA weather satellites, combined with a computer model called the Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS), in order to track and predict temperatures, rainfall levels, soil moisture content, and vegetation. This information can tell the researchers where most of the mosquitoes are going to be.
"It's an exercise in indirect reasoning," says investigator Ben Zaitchik. "These models let us predict where the soil moisture is going to be in a condition that will allow for breeding sites to form."
But mosquitoes are only half the equation. The researchers also need to know where the people are going to be, and for this they rely on a combination of census data and seasonal migration studies, informed by the same NASA data used to track mosquitoes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rigrig on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:24PM (1 child)
This so called "reasoning" could never outperform cognitive computing in a deep neural network by utilizing machine learning to analyze cloud-hosted Big malaria Data.
(The only reason nobody has done that yet is obviously because Big Pharma and Skynet are suppressing the research.)
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:10PM
Does that mean that, in order to reliably prevent infrequent epidemics like Ebola, one should ensure that we regularly acquire lots of Data ?
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:22PM (1 child)
They used to predict malaria outbreaks? What made them stop doing it? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 15 2017, @01:25AM
They were embarrassed by their 3% reliability, so they stopped predicting.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 15 2017, @01:24AM
Now, we can find those damned mosquitos, and NUKE THEM FROM ORBIT!!
All we need to do now, is find a way to get the people out of the way. Some collateral damage is alright, but wholesale slaughter would be bad publicity.