Cell phone records might help prevent the next big disease outbreak

Researchers studying the spread of disease can have a difficult time getting reliable information about how populations of people travel between locations. Thankfully, said populations do tend to wander around with tiny electronic transmitters in their pockets. In other words, by tapping into cell phone records, researchers are at last beginning to explore how to make more accurate epidemic models in anticipation of when the next big disease outbreak hits.

Flavio Finger of the École Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne in Switzerland put the cell phone data to the test in Senegal, Discover reports. Finger used records kept by the country's main service provider, which charts what tower a user's phone connects to when a call or text is sent, and when. Relying on that data, Finger was able to successfully chart the flow of religious pilgrims during a 2005 cholera outbreak:

Finger and his team are already at work on putting together a version of the model that could be rolled out quickly at the start of an outbreak.

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