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Predicting Malaria Outbreaks with NASA Satellites

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

ScienceSpace

At the NASA Image and Video Library

Clips are not offered for this film: NASA's media guidelines set the terms of its reuse themselves, not as a public licence.

About

In the Amazon Rainforest, few animals are as dangerous to humans as mosquitos that transmit malaria. The tropical disease can bring on severe fever, headaches and chills and is particularly severe for children and the elderly and can cause complications for pregnant women. In rainforest-covered Peru the number of malaria cases has spiked such that, in the past five years, it has had on average the second highest rate in the South American continent. In 2014 and 2015 there were 65,000 reported cases in the country. Containing malaria outbreaks is challenging because it is difficult to figure out where people are contracting the disease. As a result, resources such as insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor sprays are often deployed to areas where few people are getting infected, allowing the outbreak to grow. To tackle this problem, university researchers have turned to data from NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites, which are able to track the types of human and environmental events that typically precede an outbreak. With funding from NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, they are working in partnership with the Peruvian government to develop a system that uses satellite and other data to help forecast outbreaks at the household level months in advance and prevent outbreaks.

Archive
NASA Image and Video Library, in NASA
Licence or status
NASA media guidelines, as the NASA Image and Video Library states it.
Credit
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Language
English
Country
United States
Subtitles
English
Who can watch
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