Disease Ecology Meeting Event

Resistance to the anti-malarial drug Artemenisin has recently been found in Southeast Asia and it is anticipated that this resistance will spread. Planning for and restricting the spread of Aretemenisin resistance will be helped by understanding what likely spreading paths are. To facilitate this understanding, we compile data on 16 drug resistant malaria genotypes present in blood samples taken from around the world over the past 20 years. We use ecological dissimilarity measures to model the strength of connectivity between sample locations as a function of covariates such as travel times, straight-line distances and the numbers of visitors moving between locations. Predictive modeling using generalized additive models suggests strong pathways with Southeast Asia which extend to East Africa via India. Furthermore, connectivity between Asia and Africa suggests multiple pathways between these regions. Connectivity between Africa and South America is weak, but suggests that West Africa might be an origin for transport. Our results suggest that monitoring of multiple transport mechanisms will also be important for helping reduce the spread of Artemenisin resistance.

The disease ecology group meets monthly in Geography and Environment at the University of Southampton.

These meetings are intended for staff and postgraduate students at the University of Southampton with an interest in disease ecology, spatial epidemiology and the types of spatial analysis and modelling methods that may be used in this field. There will also be a lot of relevance in some of our meetings for researchers in similar fields (e.g. species distribution modelling, health geography).

All are welcome to join us – it’s a great opportunity to get together and discuss on-going research, methods, conferences, publications and more in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Feel free to bring your lunch. Usually, the first half of the session will be a presentation, and the second half will be set aside for discussion.

Further details about this talk and other in the series can be found here .