Characterizing human mobility patterns in rural settings of sub-Saharan Africa.

Human mobility is a core component of human behavior and its quantification is critical for understanding its impact on infectious disease transmission, traffic forecasting, access to resources and care, intervention strategies, and migratory flows. When mobility data are limited, spatial interaction models have been widely used to estimate human travel, but have not been extensively validated in low- and middle-income settings. Geographic, sociodemographic, and infrastructure differences may impact the ability for models to capture these patterns, particularly in rural settings.

Comparative analysis of time-based and quadrat sampling in seasonal population dynamics of intermediate hosts of human schistosomes.

Background: Despite their importance for designing and evaluating schistosomiasis control trials, little attention in the literature has been dedicated to sampling protocols for the parasite's snail intermediate hosts since their first development. We propose a comparative analysis of time-based and quadrat sampling protocols to quantify the seasonal variations in the abundance of these aquatic snail species of medical importance.

Methodology/principal Findings: Snail populations were monitored during 42 consecutive months in three types of habitats (ephemeral pond, ephemeral river and permanent stream) in two sites covering different climatic zones in Burkina Faso.

Space and time predictions of schistosomiasis snail host population dynamics across hydrologic regimes in Burkina Faso.

The ecology of the aquatic snails that serve as obligatory intermediate hosts of human schistosomiasis is driven by climatic and hydrological factors which result in specific spatial patterns of occurrence and abundance. These patterns in turn affect, jointly with other determinants, the geography of the disease and the timing of transmission windows, with direct implications for the success of control and elimination programmes in the endemic countries. We address the spatial distribution of the intermediate hosts and their seasonal population dynamics within a predictive ecohydrological framework developed at the national scale for Burkina Faso, West Africa.

Hydrology and density feedbacks control the ecology of intermediate hosts of schistosomiasis across habitats in seasonal climates.

We report about field and theoretical studies on the ecology of the aquatic snails (Bulinus spp. and Biomphalaria pfeifferi) that serve as obligate intermediate hosts in the complex life cycle of the parasites causing human schistosomiasis. Snail abundance fosters disease transmission, and thus the dynamics of snail populations are critically important for schistosomiasis modeling and control.

A Theoretical Analysis of the Geography of Schistosomiasis in Burkina Faso Highlights the Roles of Human Mobility and Water Resources Development in Disease Transmission.

We study the geography of schistosomiasis across Burkina Faso by means of a spatially explicit model of water-based disease dynamics. The model quantitatively addresses the geographic stratification of disease burden in a novel framework by explicitly accounting for drivers and controls of the disease, including spatial information on the distributions of population and infrastructure, jointly with a general description of human mobility and climatic/ecological drivers. Spatial patterns of disease are analysed by the extraction and the mapping of suitable eigenvectors of the Jacobian matrix subsuming the stability of the disease-free equilibrium.