Related papers: Spatial epidemiology and adaptive targeted samplin…
A critical component of preventing the spread of vector borne diseases such as Chagas disease are door-to-door campaigns by public health officials that implement insecticide application in order to eradicate the vector infestation of…
A map of potential prevalence of Chagas disease (ChD) with high spatial disaggregation is presented. It aims to detect areas outside the Gran Chaco ecoregion (hyperendemic for the ChD), characterized by high affinity with ChD and high…
An innovative sampling strategy is proposed, which applies to large-scale population-based surveys targeting a rare trait that is unevenly spread over a geographical area of interest. Our proposal is characterised by the ability to tailor…
We introduce a stochastic household model for vector-borne diseases, in particular as relevant to prominent vectors belonging to the Aedes genus and hence the Zika, chikungunya, and dengue viruses. In this model, vectors remain local to…
The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has made data from DNA material readily available, leading to a surge of microbiome-related research establishing links between markers of microbiome health and specific outcomes.…
Accurate estimates of subnational health and demographic indicators are critical for informing health policy decisions. Many countries collect relevant data using complex household surveys, but when data are limited, direct survey weighted…
Predicting the spread of vector-borne diseases in response to incursions requires knowledge of both host and vector demographics in advance of an outbreak. Whereas host population data is typically available, for novel disease introductions…
Chagas disease American trypanosomiasis is caused by a flagellated parasite: trypanosoma cruzi, transmitted by an insect of the genus Triatoma and also by blood transfusions. In Latin America the number of infected people is approximately 6…
Chagas disease is a neglected disease, and information about its geographical spread is very scarse. We analyze here mobility and calling patterns in order to identify potential risk zones for the disease, by using public health information…
In this paper, we develop a method to estimate the infection-rate of a disease, over a region, as a field that varies in space and time. To do so, we use time-series of case-counts of symptomatic patients as observed in the areal units that…
This work proposes a two-step method to enhance disease risk estimation in small areas by integrating spatiotemporal cluster detection within a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal model. First, we introduce an efficient…
Infectious diseases remain one of the major causes of human mortality and suffering. Mathematical models have been established as an important tool for capturing the features that drive the spread of the disease, predicting the progression…
We propose a novel stochastic model for the spread of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in a population, together with an efficient algorithm for fitting such a model to sample data. We introduce an individual-based model for the epidemic,…
Containing an epidemic at its origin is the most desirable mitigation. Epidemics have often originated in rural areas, with rural communities among the first affected. Disease dynamics in rural regions have received limited attention, and…
We present a local spread model of disease transmission on a regular network and compare different control options ranging from treating the whole population to local control in a well-defined neighborhood of an infectious individual.…
The ETAS model is widely employed to model the spatio-temporal distribution of earthquakes, generally using spatially invariant parameters. We propose an efficient method for the estimation of spatially varying parameters, using the…
Objective: Chagas disease is a parasitic infection that is endemic to South America, Central America, and, more recently, the U.S., primarily transmitted by insects. Chronic Chagas disease can cause cardiovascular diseases and digestive…
Understanding factors that contribute to the increased likelihood of disease transmission between two individuals is important for infection control. However, analyzing measures of genetic relatedness is complicated due to correlation…
We consider random forests and LASSO methods for model-based small area estimation when the number of areas with sampled data is a small fraction of the total areas for which estimates are required. Abundant auxiliary information is…
Spatially-explicit estimates of population density, together with appropriate estimates of uncertainty, are required in many management contexts. Density Surface Models (DSMs) are a two-stage approach for estimating spatially-varying…