From Global War to Local Guerrillas at International Borders

Emmanuel Roux of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development in France will develop a method to standardize malaria datasets from different countries so that they can be used to monitor the disease across borders, which is crucial for elimination. They will co-design domain ontologies with relevant experts to bridge heterogeneities and standardize metadata across existing national surveillance databases, and use generic tools to extract data on individual disease incidence in cross-border areas to build a cross-border database. They will evaluate their method at the border region between French Guiana and Brazil by providing health agencies and researchers access to the harmonized cross-border database via a web application. They will also test its accuracy at the border between Colombia, Peru and Brazil.