Malaria is the ninth most significant cause of death and disability globally. Malaria transmission provides a barrier to national economic growth and poses a constant threat to health, well-being and economic stability to millions of poor people worldwide. After decades of neglect there is a renaissance in a commitment to reduce and eliminate this disease as part of a global effort to tackle diseases of poverty through the Millennium Development Goals.
Spatial medical intelligence is central to the effective planning of malaria control. Forty years have passed since the cartography of malaria worldwide was taken seriously. The Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) was founded in 2005 to fill this niche for the malaria control community at a global scale.
The MAP team have assembled a unique spatial database of linked information based on medical intelligence and satellite-derived climate data to constrain the limits of malaria transmission and the largest ever archive of community-based estimates of parasite prevalence. To-date we have collated 18,670 parasite rate surveys (P.f. 18,353; P.v. 7,445) from an aggregated sample of 3,841,706 slides in 85 countries. These data have been assembled and analysed by a group of geographers, statisticians, epidemiologists, biologists and public health specialists.
The initial focus of MAP has been centred on Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly form of the malaria parasite, due to its global epidemiological significance and its better prospects for elimination and control. Work in 2009 begins to map the extent and burden of the so far neglected P. vivax parasite.
http://www.map.ox.ac.uk/
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