SATELLITES USED TO HELP PREDICT DEADLY DISEASE OUTBREAKS
NASA is providing new insights from space that may help health officials predict outbreaks of deadly water-borne cholera, a bacterial infection of the small intestine that can be fatal to humans.
Scientists have learned how to use satellites to track blooms of tiny floating plant and animal plankton that carry cholera bacteria by using satellite data on ocean temperatures, sea height and other climate variables. The work is described in a recent paper co-authored by University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) and NASA researchers that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"These experiments fulfill our hypothesis that cholera is associated with environmental conditions," said Dr. Rita Colwell, founder and former president of UMBI, and now Director of the National Science Foundation. She is presently on leave of absence from the University of Maryland, and is co-author of the cholera- tracking project paper.
The authors found that rising sea temperatures and ocean height near the coast of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal from 1992 to 1995 often preceded sudden growth, or "blooms," of plankton and outbreaks of cholera. Similar application of risk analysis developed by NASA using satellite data has also been used in the study of diseases such as malaria, Lyme disease and Rift Valley fever.
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