Cholera is undergoing a resurgence globally, even though it is a preventable disease. — dpa
A team of United States-based scientists and engineers have developed a mobile phone app that predicts and maps cholera, a contagious and sometimes deadly disease that in the past killed millions of people and which has seen a resurgence of late.
The team said that their app CholeraMap shows and disseminates colour-coded maps that highlight where there could be a risk of picking up the water-borne disease.
“Instead of relying on difficult-to-obtain station-based environmental and hydroclimatological data, this study offers a new opportunity to use remote sensing data sets for designing and operating a disease early-warning system,” the team said in a paper published by GeoHealth, an American Geophysical Union journal.
The app is being used in cholera-prone countryside in Bangladesh, in districts lacking an advance warning system to tell people that an outbreak could be imminent.
Around 1.3 billion people worldwide live in regions where cholera can be caught.
The disease – an infection of the gut that spreads via dirty water or contaminated food – is becoming more common again, despite it being preventable.
Ghana saw a cholera outbreak in October (2024), with dozens of cases reported.
Citing official national health data from around the world, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported on Oct 25 (2024) that over 450,000 cases of the disease had been recorded this year (2024).
In September (2024), the World Health Organization (WHO) said that the world saw 13% more cholera cases in 2023 than in 2022, while deaths from the diseases surged up by 71% to more than 4,000.
Cases were reported in 45 countries in 2023, the United Nations health agency said, but with the worrying change that for the first time, deaths from the easily-treatable infection were recorded in “community” settings – meaning outside hospitals or medical facilities – in multiple countries.
This year, cholera had claimed 2,400 more lives by August (2024), according to the WHO, which works with the Global Taskforce for Cholera Control, provider of a cholera-warning phone app for health workers. – dpa
