Date

March 14, 2025

Time

12:10 pm

Location

TBA

Host: N. Mideo

Abstract: 

Measuring interactions between humans and their environment, including population distribution and mobility, is challenging yet important for designing effective interventions that prevent and control infectious disease. Characterizing human mobility can identify gaps in accessibility to health resources or expose disease risk due to potential exposure or transmission. However, incomplete or biased estimates of movement can be misleading; I’ll show how well-meaning data-driven approaches can inadvertently magnify health inequities using a recent case study of access to health care in Namibia. I’ll explain why integrating multiple data sources can help avoid these mistakes and how to improve data collection moving forward. I’ll also show how historical datasets can reveal otherwise unknown information on past patterns of population sizes and mobility patterns that contributed to the spread of disease. We digitized a time series of road maps from 1976-2020 in Central and West Africa to examine likely movement patterns surrounding all documented Ebola outbreaks. We identified a significant correlation between transportation networks and outbreak trajectories that was consistent across locations and time. Overall, my talk will illustrate why we need to understand human movement to improve human health.