Why Model Malaria?
This vignette takes its title from an essay published by Ellis McKenzie [1]. It’s recommended reading.
Malaria Data
In making decisions and forming malaria policies, malaria analysts need to synthesize massive amounts of many different data types:
- data about the health system and clinical malaria from health facilities;
- data from entomological surveillance;
- data describing the demographic and geographic distributions of humans;
- data describing various human behaviors;
- data describing various malaria control activities;
- data describing drug and insecticide resistance;
- data describing weather and the environment;
- data and digital objects describing the locations of health facilities, political boundaries;
- data and digitial objects for geographical information systems;
- data describing malaria research on a range of topics;
The tasks for data anlysts are messy and challenging because malaria is complex, and doing analysis for decision support without understanding the underlying processes is perilous. To use the data for policy, some sort of synthesis is needed. Mechanistic models of malaria transmission are one useful way of doing synthesis.
References
1.
McKenzie FE. Why model malaria? Parasitol Today. 2000;16: 511–516. doi:10.1016/s0169-4758(00)01789-0