Mapping Cholera in Bangladesh

Hello All!

Can you believe it's October already?

For the past three months, the Village Zero team has been actively reviewing our paper, which we submitted just before our last project report. It should be just a few more weeks till we have a decision out! We're hopeful that the content we included in our manuscript will be aligned with the mission of PLoS - the "Public Library of Science".

While there were several journals to which we could have submitted our initial findings from our work in Matlab, Bangladesh, we chose PLoS because of its dedication to open access, peer-reviewed scientific literature and ethical conduct of research. In discussions among our team, we realized how essential it was to ensure that our findings were easily accessible to those who need it most - the people of Matlab, Bangladesh and the water, sanitation, and health organizations that serve them. Because access to many high quality peer-reviewed journals comes with a price tag, the reach of articles published in them can be limited. Given that the purpose of our work is not purely academic but instead humanitarian in nature, publishing in an acclaimed open access journal like PLoS is ideal. By providing free access to our findings, we move one step closer to getting important information on the proliferation of cholera in Bangladesh to those who can use it best to prevent it.

As we wait to hear back from PLoS, the creative juices at V0P are flowing. We're thinking about how tools like system dynamics, dynamic programming, and agent-based simulations can help us learn more about cholera in Bangladesh. Over the next several months, our goal is to create an intelligent model that will help us predict when and where outbreaks may occur and how severe we should expect them to be. Once we've built this model, we'll be creating an applet that works around the model - allowing users to input parameters like date, temperature, rainfall, humidity, etc. to pull up a spatiotemporal forecast of the disease. As we ask ourselves at V0P, "What if we could predict cholera like we can predict the weather?" With your continued support, we'll be able to discover just how much impact we've got in store!

With Gratitude,
Maia Majumder