Measuring Malaria
History, Data, Analysis
Malaria data, malaria metrics, and the measurement of malaria in populations. What do we know about malaria? Where can we find the evidence that supports our beliefs about malaria? What is missing?
In 1880, Laveran looked through a lense and saw malaria micro-gametocytes exflagellating. That event marks the beginning of the modern study of malaria. Today, more than a dozen dozen years later, thousands of studies have established a solid basis for understanding and managing malaria.
I established this website as a way of organizing information about malaria to make the concepts and data accessible to a large audience. It’s focus is the quantitative study of malaria in populations from an academic perspective. It is a hub for malaria data and malaria research published in peer review. I wanted to collect the studies that have shaped our current understanding of malaria. I also wanted wanted to draw attention to some of our blind spots.
SCOPE – Malaria is complex, so the study of malaria covers a broad range of topics and data describing human malaria epidemiology, malaria transmission, human travel and mobility, car seeking and health systems, medical entomology, mosquito ecology, drug and insecticide resistance. An interesting feature of malaria is the role that mathematical models have played in development of malaria metrics. This website does not delve into mathematical models, computation, or malaria analytics. Some mathematics and computation is necessary, but that is not why this site exists. Mathematical theory is covered in a companion site called Malaria Theory. When models are needed to illustrate something, we use SimBA. Malaria analytics – the systematic analyis of data for policy – is discussed in RAMP and Adaptive Malaria Control. The hope is that the constellation of websites makes it easier to learn background material that is required to support simulation-based analytics for malaria programs.
HISTORY – In my study of malaria, I am constantly reminded of historical context, and what it can teach us about malaria. While some methods have changed, many old field studies of malaria use the same field metrics or methods that we would use today. Some of those old reports have detailed hand-drawn maps that demonstrate extreme attention to detail. Some of the basic observational studies done a century ago are still highly relevant today. We can learn an awful lot about malaria from some of the old studies, including some old data that could be useful today. If malaria parasites, the humans, and the mosquitoes are still basically the same, then the studies are still relevant. If, on the other hand, there have been important changes in malaria epidemiology, then those changes are also of great interest.
DATA – This website is also a way of archiving and sharing data sets extracted from old papers over the years on various themes. In some cases, large data sets were collected, published in peer review, and archived elsewhere by others. This site isn’t meant to be a complete archive, so I won’t be mirroring all of the data that has been permanently archived elsewhere. I will will provide links. As an attempt to collect data describing population studies and malaria control trials over more than a century, it also serves as a large annotated bibliography and a compendium of malaria history.
For the data sets I provide here, the rules I followed were simple. For any line in a summary table of a paper I’ve published, data from the paper (or papers) should be digitized and archived here, if not elsewhere. The data should be stored in a common, machine readable format (plain text, formatted with comma separated values). A webpage should describe the details of the extraction, and it should include code that reads in the data set and plots it.
NAVIGATION – The website is a collection of short essays, called vignettes. The navbar at the top includes links to related topics and some standalone concepts. The sidebar at the left presents topics as an organized outline. Most of the vignettes are short and focused. A few are longer. The website is searchable (try)
If you would like to contribute, please write me: – Professor David L Smith, University of Washington