Publications by authors named "N Jouanard"
Article Synopsis
- Many low- and middle-income communities face interconnected challenges related to infectious diseases, food insecurity, and water access, which lack effective solutions.
- A study in West Africa shows that agricultural development can inadvertently increase schistosomiasis by promoting the growth of invasive aquatic vegetation that hosts disease-carrying snails; however, removing this vegetation led to lower infection rates in schoolchildren and no long-term negative impact on water quality.
- The removal process not only provided a cost-effective alternative for livestock feed but also helped return nutrients to agriculture while offering substantial public health benefits, creating a promising model for addressing poverty, disease, and environmental sustainability simultaneously.
Use of agrochemicals, including insecticides, is vital to food production and predicted to increase 2-5 fold by 2050. Previous studies have shown a positive association between agriculture and the human infectious disease schistosomiasis, which is problematic as this parasitic disease infects approximately 250 million people worldwide. Certain insecticides might runoff fields and be highly toxic to invertebrates, such as prawns in the genus Macrobrachium, that are biocontrol agents for snails that transmit the parasites causing schistosomiasis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Infectious disease risk is driven by three interrelated components: exposure, hazard, and vulnerability. For schistosomiasis, exposure occurs through contact with water, which is often tied to daily activities. Water contact, however, does not imply risk unless the environmental hazard of snails and parasites is also present in the water.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Schistosome parasites, affecting over 200 million people mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, show varied infection risks based on the distribution of their intermediate host snails.
- The study examines schistosomiasis risk in 16 villages along the Senegal River, focusing on the spatial distribution of snails and their relationship to human infections of two species, S. haematobium and S. mansoni.
- Results indicate that S. haematobium infection risk increases with snail habitat up to 120 meters from shore and larger water access sites, while S. mansoni risk relates to smaller, sheltered sites without a positive correlation to snail habitat.
Article Synopsis
- Computer vision, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), is explored for classifying environmental stages of parasites and their snail hosts in public health, focusing on schistosomiasis as a case study.
- The study trained a CNN on a dataset of over 10,600 images from the Senegal River Basin, achieving high accuracy (99% for snails and 91% for cercariae) comparable to expert guidelines.
- Results indicate that such machine learning models could assist in identifying disease vectors in remote areas, enhancing public health efforts by providing a practical tool for classification using smartphones.