INDEPTH Network: a viable platform for the assessment of malaria risk in developing countries

The INDEPTH Network is an international network currently consisting of 33 demographic surveillance system (DSS) field sites in 19 countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania that collectively monitor over 2,000,000 people at a household level. Each INDEPTH site has a geographically defined population under continuous demographic evaluation, with timely production of data on all births, deaths and migrations. This monitoring system provides a platform for a wide range of healthsystem innovations, as well as social, economic, behavioural and health interventions, all closely associated with research activities. INDEPTH launched the Malaria Transmission Intensity and Mortality Burden Across Africa (MTIMBA) initiative to generate reliable information that will guide malaria control policies in Africa, as well as to generate new understanding of the relationship between malaria transmission intensity, mortality and the effect of malaria control. The MTIMBA project produces estimates of all-cause and malaria-attributable mortality by age across Africa and documents trends in malaria in INDEPTH sites. INDEPTH now plans to link DSS data to geographical and meteorological data, using remote sensing (RS) and a Geographical Information System (GIS). This will enable much deeper and/or novel insights into parameters that influence the spread of diseases, especially malaria. The meteorological data will complement the DSS data with the introduction of the spatiotemporal fluctuations of temperature, humidity, precipitation, evapo-transpiration and wind. Hence, the different data sets can be used for geo-statistical modelling, mapping and geographical and epidemiological analyses. An INDEPTH environment and health platform has been established with the first initiative to study the relationship between climate variability and the transmission of infectious diseases, focussing on malaria. This paper presents a brief overview of the INDEPTH Network, its MTIMBA project and the proposed research work on climate variability and the spread of infectious diseases.

Keywords: demographic surveillance systems; climate variability; environmental change; malaria transmission