Local Burden of Disease Publications

Diarrheal diseases are the third leading cause of disease and death in children younger than 5 years of age in Africa and were responsible for an estimated 30 million cases of severe diarrhea and 330,000 deaths in 2015. Our findings showed concentrated areas of diarrheal disease and diarrhea-related death in countries that had a consistently high burden as well as in countries that had considerable national-level reductions in diarrhea burden.

Snakebite envenoming is a frequently overlooked cause of mortality and morbidity. Identifying exact populations vulnerable to the most severe outcomes of snakebite envenoming at a subnational level is important for prioritizing new data collection and collation, reinforcing envenoming treatment, existing health care systems, and deploying currently available and future interventions.

Educational attainment for women of reproductive age is linked to reduced child and maternal mortality, lower fertility, and improved reproductive health. Comparable analyses of attainment exist only at the national level, potentially obscuring patterns in subnational inequality. Here we explore within-country inequalities by predicting years of schooling across five by five kilometer grids, generating estimates of average educational attainment by age and sex at subnational levels. Despite marked progress in attainment from 2000 to 2015 across Africa, substantial differences persist between locations and sexes.

During the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era, many countries in Africa achieved marked reductions in under-5 and neonatal mortality. Yet the pace of progress toward these goals substantially varied at the national level, demonstrating an essential need for tracking even more local trends in child mortality. With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, which established ambitious targets for improving child survival by 2030, optimal intervention planning and targeting will require understanding of trends and rates of progress at a higher spatial resolution. In this study, we aimed to generate high-resolution estimates of under-5 and neonatal all-cause mortality across 46 countries in Africa.

As the outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa is now contained, attention is turning from control to future outbreak prediction and prevention. Building on a previously published zoonotic niche map, this study incorporates new human and animal occurrence data and expands upon the way in which potential bat EVD reservoir species are incorporated.

Zika virus was discovered in Uganda in 1947 and is transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, which also act as vectors for dengue and chikungunya viruses throughout much of the tropical world. Possible associations with microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome observed in this outbreak have raised concerns about continued global spread of Zika virus, prompting its declaration as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. We conducted species distribution modelling to map environmental suitability for Zika. We show a large portion of tropical and sub-tropical regions globally have suitable environmental conditions with over 2.17 billion people inhabiting these areas.

Pathogen distribution models that predict spatial variation in disease occurrence require data from a large number of geographic locations to generate disease risk maps. We have developed a supervised learning process to validate geolocated disease outbreak data in a timely manner. 

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne infection caused by a virus (CCHFV) from the Bunyaviridae family. We used an exhaustive database of human CCHF occurrence records and a niche modeling framework to map the global distribution of risk for human CCHF occurrence.

This paper outlines a framework which compares each disease’s global burden with its associated interest from the policy community in a data-driven manner which can be used to determine the relative priority of each condition. Malaria, HIV, and TB are, unsurprisingly, ranked highest due to their considerable health burden, while the other priority diseases are dominated by neglected tropical diseases and vector-borne diseases. For some conditions, global mapping efforts are already in place; however, for many neglected conditions there still remains a need for high-resolution spatial surveys.