Anti-Ebola virus: Large data available to track and predict outbreaks

&http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37954.html ">nbsp; According to foreign media reports, the Ebola outbreak has so far led to the death of at least 4500 people, health authorities in West Africa and around the world are trying to take measures to curb the spread of the Ebola virus, such as the border of the outbreak country, the airport to the passengers for health screening, school classes and so on. And for the epidemic tracking, mobile data is an effective tool, but for a variety of reasons, researchers have not been able to obtain such data.

When people call a cell phone, the call data record (CDR) is then recorded in the network, which includes the caller and listener's number, call time, and the signal tower responsible for processing (the signal tower helps to determine the approximate location of the phone).

It is worth looking forward to the role that CDR can play in the field of epidemiology in the context of global concern and cooperation in the Ebola epidemic. At present, to judge the spread of the epidemic is mainly based on the census, investigation and hearsay speculation. Unlike CDR, this record provides direct, real-time updates of real data, not based on guesswork. The researchers can directly know where people are or where they are moving, based on CDR. Researchers have used such data to track malaria outbreaks in Kenya and Namibia. The outbreak of swine flu in Mexico in 2009 has been monitored by the researchers using CDR to monitor public responses to government health warnings. In 2010, Haiti was hit by an earthquake, followed by a cholera outbreak, and CDR was also used to record population movements to infer which areas needed rescue.

But the use of CDR in the fight against Ebola faces a hurdle: most people in West Africa don't have a cell phone. The researchers can use CDR to track population movements in a given epidemic area, and to determine which areas are likely to erupt in the next, so that the limited resources available are properly deployed. The Association of Mobile network operators and the United Nations hope that telecoms companies will be able to provide CDR data to researchers, but after months of negotiations, this effort has not progressed substantially.

Because it's a matter of privacy, especially for countries with a civil war or tribal conflict, that is certainly understandable. But anonymity in the collection and research of telephone data helps to protect privacy in some way. But the bigger problem is the system. Big data is a whole new field. The people who are responsible for overseeing cell phone data are usually young people who often lack influence and have no right to provide such data to researchers.

Curbing the Ebola epidemic requires all aspects of the effort, such as the development of new drugs, strict isolation, patient care and treatment. Governments should require mobile operators to allow researchers access to CDR data to play their part.