Decision Support Applications for Public Health Surveillance using NASA Earth Observations

Malaria is caused by blood parasites transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes. In malaria-endemic countries large amounts of public health resources are devoted to controlling mosquitoes, through insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor residual spraying, and eliminating breeding sites. The efficacy of these interventions can be directly influenced by environmental conditions that impact mosquito activity, such as rainfall, temperature, and vegetation. Good quality environmental data are available through countries with satellite-based Earth observations, but the capacity to transfer this data to researchers and public health decision-makers are lacking. Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and NASA have developed a cloud-based web solution to ease the complications of accessing NASA Earth observations from multiple repositories with myriad datasets. A web application called the NASA Earth Observation Import Tool was developed to integrate with public health software already in use by nearly all malaria-endemic countries and provide several key earth observation datasets that are pre-aggregated to regional and sub-regional administrative areas within each country. These services are currently being utilized in support of a web application for the District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) system that is used by at least 73 countries. In most of these countries, monthly counts of malaria cases (malaria incidence) are reported to the DHIS2. The frequency and geospatial areas of the earth observation data are designed to match those of malaria cases, thus facilitating comparisons and correlations of earth observation data with malaria incidence. Because the web application provides DHIS2 with pre-aggregated Earth observation data, the impact on the health information system is minimized, making highly complex data readily available and analyzable. This presentation will discuss the capability of the services, provide examples, and discuss applying the results to intervention efficacy.