Theme: Climate and Remote Sensing: Research Priorities in Infectious Disease Control

Question for Discussion:
What climate and remote sensing approaches should be research priorities in infectious disease control?
 
Consider

• methodological approaches for climate, remote sensing and disease control
• general research priorities in infectious disease control

This forum theme draws upon the Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP) of the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank (WB), and the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (FIC/NIH).
http://www.fic.nih.gov/dcpp

DCPP focuses on developing countries, working closely with the Tropical Disease Research (TDR) program at WHO. TDR has established a matrix of strategic emphases for 10 diseases of current interest.
Category 1: emerging or uncontrolled -- African trypanosomiasis; dengue fever; leishmaniasis
Category 2: disease burden persists despite the availability of a control strategy -- malaria; schistosomiasis; tuberculosis
Category 3: control strategy proven effective, falling disease burden, elimination planned -- Chagas disease; leprosy; lymphatic filariasis; onchocerciasis
http://www.who.int/tdr/grants/strategic-emphases/default.htm

This forum theme also draws upon the growing interest in using climate and remote sensing information to control infectious diseases. One example of the interest is a 2001 report from the U.S. National Research Council.
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10025.html

DCPP builds heavily upon the methodology of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to compare disease burden as a way to guide public health investments. However, this approach may not always be appropriate because of the complex dynamics of disease transmission. In a recent DCPP workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Mark Miller (FIC/NIH) pointed out the need to maintain disease control measures to prevent the resurgence of a disease that has been "eliminated". In the same workshop, Ramanan Lasminarayan (Resources for the Future) showed the importance of long-range thinking to manage drug resistance to malaria; using more expensive drugs may be more expensive in the short term, but better in the long term.
http://www.fic.nih.gov/dcpp/con5pres.html

It is also important to identify assumptions and value judgments implicit in methods for economic valuation. It is particularly a problem for public health interventions that require large upfront expenditures for benefits many years into the future. See, for example, Aron and Zimmerman on the Cross-disciplinary Communication Needed to Promote the Effective Use of Indicators in Making Decisions, 2002, page S25. (pdf file 1.56 mb)

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Diagnostics and prediction of climate variability and human health impacts in the tropical Americas