Applications and advances in acoustic monitoring for infectious disease epidemiology.

Emerging infectious diseases continue to pose a significant burden on global public health, and there is a critical need to better understand transmission dynamics arising at the interface of human activity and wildlife habitats. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), more typically applied to questions of biodiversity and conservation, provides an opportunity to collect and analyse audio data in relative real time and at low cost. Acoustic methods are increasingly accessible, with the expansion of cloud-based computing, low-cost hardware, and machine learning approaches.

Exposure of Primate Reservoir Hosts to Mosquito Vectors in Malaysian Borneo.

Several vector-borne pathogens of primates have potential for human spillover. An example is the simian malaria Plasmodium knowlesi which is now a major public health problem in Malaysia. Characterization of exposure to mosquito vectors is essential for assessment of the force of infection within wild simian populations, however few methods exist to do so.

Epidemiology of the zoonotic malaria Plasmodium knowlesi in changing landscapes.

Within the past two decades, incidence of human cases of the zoonotic malaria Plasmodium knowlesi has increased markedly. P. knowlesi is now the most common cause of human malaria in Malaysia and threatens to undermine malaria control programmes across Southeast Asia.

A comparative evaluation of thermal camera and visual counting methods for primate census in a riparian forest at the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary (LKWS), Malaysian Borneo.

A number of primate census techniques have been developed over the past half-century, each of which have advantages and disadvantages in terms of resources required by researchers (e.g., time and costs), availability of technologies, and effectiveness in different habitat types.