Network Profile: Improving Response to Malaria in the Amazon through Identification of Inter-Community Networks and Human Mobility in Border Regions of Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil

CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides measures of mobility and connectivity in rural settings where traditional approaches are insufficient, and will allow us to understand mobility's effect on malaria transmission.STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS: Strength: Community networks are unmeasured in rural areas of the Amazon, but have been shown to capture human mobility in other regions of the world.Strength: Our design captures social, economic, and human wellbeing connectivity and migration in key indigenous communities along the Peru-Ecuador border as well as in the most important confluence for the Amazon River located in the Brazil-Peru-Colombia tri-country intersection.Strength: Our design quantifies cross-border human mobility between communities, as well as the magnitude, timing, duration, and reason for mobility, which provides actionable information for malaria control and elimination programs in the regionLimitation: Migration decisions occur at individual and household levels that are coupled with environmental change and seasonality, meaning that our measures of community mobility may not be stable over time and we may be subject to ecological fallacy by inferring individual risk from community networks.Limitation: Our study relies on passive surveillance to test the community network/human mobility link with malaria. However, there exist cases that are asymptomatic, unreported (i.e., treated with traditional medicines), or that occur in our community network but are reported els...
Source: Rural Remote Health - Category: Rural Health Authors: Source Type: research