Could data help warn us of dengue outbreaks?
IN THE Philippines more than 622 people – most of whom were children under five years old – have died from dengue so far this year. The country is seeing more than 5,100 new cases each week.
In at least one province, tents are serving as makeshift treatment centres to deal with the crush of patients.
The Philippines declared the outbreak a National Epidemic in August. The Philippines isn’t alone. In Bangladesh, the dengue outbreak is the country’s worst ever.
The sheer number of dengue patients – some days there are more than 2,000 new cases in just a 24 hour period – is placing immense strain on health systems.
There’s been a shortage of the quicktest kits that are able to detect early stages of dengue. Demand for blood and platelets is reportedly outstripping the supply at many donation centres.
In Cambodia, representatives of one hospital say the outbreak has the potential to be the worst they have seen since the hospital opened 20 years ago.
Angkor Hospital for Children has treated more than 2,937 dengue patients thus far in 2019 – 42 per cent more than the same period in 2012, which was previously the hospital’s worst dengue year on record.
And the cases are more severe than normal.
“Usually with dengue, the severe cases are around 10 per cent of admissions,” Dr Ngeth Pises, Angkor Hospital’s medical director, told Asia News Network.
“But this year, more than 50 per cent of cases have been hospitalised. We have seen more serious cases than ever.”
The hospital is running out of room for patients, and has resorted to setting up mattresses on hallway floors.
Not all dengue years are this bad.
One of the key hallmarks of the disease is that peak outbreak years come in cycles, usually around three to four years apart.
But scientists don’t fully understand why that is or, even more crucially, how to predict when and where a major outbreak is coming.
And that means that even where dengue has long been endemic, places like the Philippines, Bangladesh and Cambodia can be caught off guard.
That’s partly to do with the unique ways the dengue virus works.
But it’s also partly because of issues with our data collection – to predict dengue, we need better data and more of it.
Mathematical modelling
Richard Maude is the head of the Epidemiology Department at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit.
His Bangkok-based team provides support to the governments in Thailand and Myanmar, and indirectly in the Philippines.
One of the forms that support takes is mathematical modelling.
The team is using new approaches to account for variables that have otherwise been difficult to account for – the movement of people, for example – to develop models intended to predict future dengue outbreaks.
To create a Thailand-specific model that takes humans and their comings and goings into account, Maude and his team turned to the data-creation devices we all keep in our pockets – our mobile phones.
Maude’s team took data from Thai phone users that has been scrubbed of identifying information, turned that information into matrices of how much people are moving and plugged it into a model that crossreferences that data with the locations where the dengue virus has cropped up over time.
The real measure of success for a model like this one, Maude said, is that “these predictions have to be good enough that the government could then use it to make a plan, to act on the predictions”.
If governments know when a bad year is coming, for example, they might be able to prevent the shortages of dengue tests and hospital beds that are happening right now in Cambodia, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
Maybe the biggest problem holding these predictive models back is the data.
“We know about rainfall driving mosquito numbers, we know that people spread dengue when they travel around,” Maude said.
“But there’s also things that we are not able to include – like immunity to dengue over time in the population.”
Immunity
Data about population immunity are critical to predicting how dengue will circulate through a community, as well as how severe those cases will turn out to be.
Patients who recover from an infection of one dengue serotype will have lifelong immunity against that particular strand of the virus.
But subsequent infection by other serotypes increases the risk that person will develop severe dengue. gaps in the dengue data aren’t necessarily the fault of any one country’s dengue control programme.
“It’s the whole health system and the population that are responsible for that data,” Maude said.
To get complete and accurate data, Maude says scientists are, in essence “relying on huge numbers of people to do something consistently”.
A big ask, even in the best conditions. There’s just no incentive for every single doctor to report every single case of dengue.
As Maude puts it, data collection “is just more work”.
Are any countries already using prediction models to anticipated dengue outbreaks?
The only government Maude is aware of that’s already putting predictive models to use is Singapore.
One model developed in Singapore with the help of machine learning was able to forecast major dengue outbreaks in 2013 and 2014 more than 10 weeks in advance, allowing the government to prepare hospital beds, diagnostic kits and deploy extra personnel for on-the-ground mosquito control and community outreach.
The city-state has used information from this predictive model in part to mobilise information campaigns to ramp up awareness of dengue when the data forecast a bad year.
“The model allows us to confidently warn the public that there could be an outbreak coming,” said Dr Ng Lee Ching, who is the director of Singapore’s National Environment Agency, in a 2016 journal article on this particular predictive model.
“It’s very difficult to be alert at all times. You get fatigued. The public messaging can’t be done all the time, [so] the model suggests when to intensify our message or to mobilise the community.”
But Singapore has a few key advantages – very high quality data about a very small geographical area.
In the case of other countries, “how well [these models] work depends on what the data in each country look like, what’s available and the format of that information”.
Until data availability and data accuracy improve, innovations in the prediction space will be slow to come.