The article describes how researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland used meteorological data to predict the development of weather conditions that would favor an epidemic of Rift Valley Fever in East Africa, and how their warning was used by public health officials to reduce the lethality of the epidemic.
Attempts to foresee epidemics such as these have traditionally relied on fieldwork on the ground. This is often slow and expensive. Crunching data from satellites is much less costly. Satellites transmit copious information on temperatures, precipitation, vegetation cover and even the health, moisture content and chlorophyll-production of plants.The article also mentions applications of satellite data and computer processing to predict tsetse fly vector capacity and thus the danger from sleeping sickness, and to identify the frequency of mosquito breeding sites to help deal with malaria.
Comment: This is a technology that I had hoped would develop more rapidly. As I recall there was an application to screw worm control in Mexico decades ago. I suspect that the problem is that the tropical diseases that are weather related are most problematic in places with few scientists using satellite data (and little funding for remote sensing research. On the other hand, I would think that there could be comparable studies done on air pollution with important health benefits in developed nations as well as developing nations. JAD
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