Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jul 14, 2019
Date Accepted: Jun 1, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jul 14, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Malaria surveillance: a solution for building shared and unified cross-border visions
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cross-border malaria is a significant obstacle to achieving malaria control and elimination worldwide.
Objective:
This study aimed to build a cross-border surveillance system available to all parties involved in malaria control between French Guiana and Brazil that can provide comparable and qualified data on the cross-border epidemiological situation of the disease.
Methods:
Data reconciliation rules based on expert knowledge were defined and applied to the heterogeneous data provided by the existing malaria surveillance systems of both countries. Visualization dashboards were designed to facilitate progressive data exploration, analysis, and interpretation. Dedicated advanced open source and robust software solutions were chosen to facilitate solution sharing and reuse.
Results:
Online dashboards are available with regularly updated malaria case numbers in the cross-border area with different time aggregation levels, cartographic representation, and data quality representation.
Conclusions:
This cross-border monitoring tool could help to produce new scientific evidence on cross-border malaria dynamics, implementing cross-border cooperation for malaria control and elimination, and can be quickly adapted to other cross-border contexts.
Citation
