Cell phone records might help prevent the next big disease outbreak

Cell phones could lead to new epidemiology research.

(Image credit: J.D. Pooley/Getyy Images)

published 24 May 2016

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:

Armed with the mobile phone records that showed the pilgrims’ routes home in 2013, the model reproduced the real-world spread of the cholera epidemic to ten of the country’s eleven arrondissements with returning pilgrims in 2005.And according to the model, if authorities had managed to reduce contamination in Touba by just 10 percent during the 2005 Touba, they could have reduced the number of cholera cases by 23 percent in Diourbel and 18 percent across Senegal. [Discover]

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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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.