•  paris
• Wednesday, June 01, 2011
• Inter Press Service

In times of war, the accurate mapping of enemy positions can be the key to victory. In the war on mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, mapping the distribution and habitat of mosquitoes can play a crucial role in combating epidemics at the source.

This is the rationale behind VECMAP, a mosquito mapping project being undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA). VECMAP is being used to identify the habitat and distribution of mosquitoes in Europe by combining data from field work and satellites transferred to databases through smart phones.

A testing phase was launched in November 2009, and a workshop to review the initial results was held a year later. The third phase, which began in early May, includes the validation of the complete mapping system and testing of the economic viability of the project, for which budget coverage has been allocated until mid-2013.

There are also plans to test VECMAP in Benin and French Polynesia. 'We are trying to develop the most precise maps possible, especially for vectors of diseases like malaria, dengue and West Nile fever,' the ESA technical officer in charge of the programme, Michiel Kruijff, told Tierramérica.

VECMAP is being carried out with the cooperation of public health agencies in a number of European countries, such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Switzerland.

Tropical mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, chikungunya and West Nile fever have rapidly become a public health threat in Europe that is proving difficult to confront. 'We know very little about the distribution of these diseases and their vectors,' said Kruijff.

The presence and spread of these types of diseases depend on many different and interacting factors, such as the current distribution of mosquitoes, their population densities, climate, wind patterns, proximity to bodies of water, land use and vegetation. In addition, the frequency of intercontinental travel and trade and global warming allow foreign species to establish themselves in new environments, where their natural enemies are not found.

'In cases like these, mapping technology based on satellite and telecommunications allows for the integrated identification of areas where the abundance of mosquitoes, weather conditions, seasonal trends and other variables indicate that a critical public health situation could arise,' said Kruijff.

In his opinion, 'there is a need for maps showing where mosquitoes have been detected, what directions they are moving in, what factors that influence their growth are detectable at a given moment, and when the populations in question will peak.'

These maps could make it possible to design preventive campaigns before epidemics break out, or to implement treatment programmes once an epidemic has begun. Under the coordination of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), VECMAP integrates numerous technologies to track mosquitoes, making it a sort of 'one-stop-shop for vector mapping,' RIVM entomologist Marieta Braks told Tierramérica.

'The idea is to combine field data in what are suspected to be key regions - temperature, humidity, the presence of stagnant water - and transmit them by smart phone to the satellite global navigation system and integrate them with other data, such as probability of rain, winds and the morbidity rate of the pathology,' explained Braks.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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