High-Resolution Ecological Mapping of Filarial Vectors

Louise Kelly-Hope of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom and Thomas Unnasch of the University of South Florida in the U.S., along with their research teams, will develop high resolution tools to map the locations and chart the habitats of vectors of several parasitic worm infections to promote safer and more effective control strategies. Some of the drugs that can successfully treat parasite infections become harmful in the presence of other parasites, but predicting where these co-infections are most likely to occur is difficult. Using the fly vectors for the parasitic nematode Loa loa, they will develop a remote sensing model for predicting its presence by identifying environmental factors that the flies favor using satellite technology and geographic information systems, and validate the model by performing ground-based studies in several African countries.