Malaria Data
At the time of this writing, a dozen dozen years have passed since Laveran gazed through a light microscope and found his attention drawn to malaria microgametocytes exflagellating. Over that time, there have been thousands of studies of malaria. While some methods have changed, most of the old field studies of malaria use the same metrics we do. Some of those old reports have detailed hand-drawn maps that demonstrate attention to detail. Those 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, forgotten ideas that could be revived and tested 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. Some old studies could not (and perhaps should not) be repeated today.
This website is my personal homage to the malariology, but it 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. This site isn’t meant to be a complete archive, so I won’t be mirroring any 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.
The sidebar on the left has links organized in the following way:
Malaria Control is a list of studies that were set up around malaria control or a malaria control trial of some sort.
Studies are large observational projects.
Malaria Research Centers are institutions in Africa with substantial malaria research.
Papers includes a list of the specific papers from which data have been extracted.
Themes collect data by theme.