Disease Control and Mobile Technology in South Asia Caroline Buckee
The continuing burden of infectious diseases, as well as the increasing potential for the emergence and epidemic spread of devastating new pathogens, remains an urgent threat to South Asia. Three twenty-first-century phenomena likely to accelerate in coming years underlie the immediacy of these public health crises. First, rural-to-urban migration and high birth rates have contributed to the rise of population densities within urban and peri-urban environments; they have created the “human fuel� necessary for the rapid spread of communicable diseases in population centers. Second, continuing encroachment of human populations into the habitats of animals that potentially harbor zoonotic pathogens increases the chances of cross-species jumps of ecological and evolutionary events that have sparked most major global pandemics. Third, globalization has seen unprecedented human mobility on a grand regional and international scale, rendering the swift geographic expansion of disease inevitable; this is highlighted by the rapid international spread of SARS, swine flu, and Ebola in recent years. These burgeoning risks require improved surveillance systems, aggressive control programs, and efficient containment strategies, all of which can benefit from the pervasive proliferation of mobile technologies across South Asia, particularly in vulnerable populations and in physically inaccessible areas. Perhaps the most obvious applications of mobile technologies to the mitigation of infectious disease threats are specific surveillance apps that facilitate communication and data transfer between public health professionals. Many national surveillance programs in South Asia are still pencil-and-paper based systems that require the transportation of medical records from hard copy to central surveillance repository. Computer engineers have developed a plethora of mHealth approaches for the collection of epidemiological and clinical data on tablets or mobile phones by clinicians, nurses, or community health workers. These apps facilitate the rapid transfer of information to Harvard South Asia Institute 33