Trends in Parasitology
Volume 34, Issue 9, September 2018, Pages 727-729
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Science & Society
Citizen Science: A Gateway for Innovation in Disease-Carrying Mosquito Management?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pt.2018.04.010Get rights and content

Traditional methods for tracking disease-carrying mosquitoes are hitting budget constraints as the scales over which they must be implemented grow exponentially. Citizen science offers a novel solution to this problem but requires new models of innovation in the public health sector.

Section snippets

From Traditional Surveillance to Citizen Science

To control disease vector mosquitoes, public health agencies need to know where they are. Traditional surveillance methods such as female oviposition traps are expensive to implement over large areas because they depend on labor from professional scientists or practitioners. Large-scale surveillance, however, is necessary because many disease vectors are invasive species that spread rapidly, with ‘jumpy’ invasion patterns causing them to frequently appear in unexpected places, far from their

Mosquito Alert: A Case Study in Spain

When we, the authors, started analyzing the Asian tiger mosquito invasion in Spain 7, 8 several years ago as part of our research, we realized that surveillance covered certain areas near the places where these mosquitoes had been detected, but the spatial and temporal coverage was spotty and clearly incomplete. Surveillance ended, or was reduced, in some places once the species was first discovered, or as a consequence of the economic crisis, even as evidence was building that the mosquito was

Citizen Science and Big Data: Towards Open Innovation Models for Public Health

There is increasing evidence that combining citizen scientist data with other sources of information significantly improves our knowledge in a given area 1, 2, 7, 8, 10, 11. In addition, our recent work [12] shows that, once we adjust for sampling biases associated with smartphone-collected information, citizen science data have almost the same quality and predictive power as data obtained from traditional surveillance. Clearly, combining citizen data with other data sources adds statistical

From Regional Initiatives to Globalized Solutions

In parallel, and following the vector control roadmap laid out recently by the World Health Organization [16], the other challenge is to exploit the inherently scalable nature of Internet networked citizen science to offer an open, global toolkit that can aid in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases at the global scale. The potential exists but its implementation requires the generation of data and method standards across different projects, as well as developing modular projects where code

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the work of the Mosquito Alert team and all the anonymous citizens who have volunteered their time and energy to participate in Mosquito Alert. Mosquito Alert is currently promoted by the ‘la Caixa' Banking Foundation and the Diputación de Salud de Girona (Dipsalut) and sponsored by the company Lokimica S.A. FB also wishes to thank the support from MINECO 2014–2017 (Grant CGL2013-43139-R) and the Spanish Science and Technology Foundation (Grants FCT-13-7019, FCT-15-9515).

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