I'm Chris Drakeley, Professor of Infection and Immunity at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine. In terms of where we are with the global attack
on malaria, is three main areas. The first of those is to scale up our
existing interventions such as mosquito nets, the availability of adequate
treatment and then to extend that to develop new tools to which we
can attack the parasite and the mosquito. But the third pillar is to try and make
better use of the information which we collect in malaria endemic countries and
this is surveillance data and typically in the past this has simply been used to
record the amount and number of cases that have been there, but what we really
want to do as a community is turn that on its head and say: "Now we have
identified where those cases are, let's do something about it." One of the
things that we are doing is investigating a specific type of malaria,
a zoonotic malaria, which is carried by macaques in Southeast Asia but there
have been increasing number of cases in humans and that malaria has quite a high
case fatality rate. So obviously local governments are very interested in
understanding a little bit more about that. Part of the reason we think that
there's been an increase, is changes in the environment and changes in human
behaviour. It's quite difficult to assess those changes, particularly in the
environment from conventional means such as satellite imagery or even from the ground.
One of the things we have done is employed a relatively small drone to
allow us to accurately map environmental change in the areas where this
malaria is occurring and to see how changes in forest cover affect macaque
movement and human behavior. Then to try and put those together, to see how
that affects the increased risk of getting malaria. We're one of the
few malaria research groups in the world to be able to use drone technology to
more accurately map where malaria transmission might be occurring. What the
use of these drones has allowed us to do is allow much more frequent assessment
of changes in natural environments, so before we would have to rely on the
passing of satellites which is not necessarily very frequent. The drones
mean we can fly on any day and get an assessment, a rapid assessment of that
ground cover. The drones also have issues around whether you can use them in
certain areas. People can be slightly wary of small drones flying
over, and people with invested interests in forests or mining or so and so forth.
So that's a certain issue and there's also general issues about flight paths.
So one of the ways that we're using mobile technology is to use tablets with
maps in health facilities in endemic countries, so what the mobile phone
technology allows us to do is to provide that more accurate description of where
malaria is within a community, so rather than the control program
having to deliver nets across a whole swathe of an area, they could potentially
focus on the areas where malaria is most prevalent or remains. But with any new
technology, one of the prime issues is working out how much of that
information is going to be useful. So I think the primary challenge is, how
do we make this the simplest way and have a simple and effective way to use that.
With the mobile phone technology, it's generally staying up to speed with the
technological advances such that you don't create something that's obsolete
within such a few years, that once you've introduced it it's already kind of been
superseded by something more advanced. If we find an area with our mobile
phones that has a higher level of malaria, the potential would be that a
drone might be able to deliver the supplies there. If we find a particular
clinic that says: we're having an experience of more cases, the drone
might be able to bring more rapid tests and it might be able to bring more drugs
or even, you know, blood supplies if transfusions are required. So the
potential for integrating that would be slightly outside of the remit of the
conventional kind of research arena, it's bringing it much more into a public/private
kind of health practice.