Mosquitoes are responsible for transfer of many vector-borne diseases. Dengue is one such viral infection that is transmitted by the Aedes mosquito. It is preventable but still the number of Dengue cases have risen 30-fold in the past 50 years. In several countries in south American continent and Asia, dengue is one of the leading causes of death. It is mainly found in tropical and sub-tropical regions, particularly surrounding urban and semi-urban areas.
Historically, there has been an intensive increase in the number of dengue cases from 2000-2010 and, if adequately explored, essential information can be retrieved. Thus, we decided to develop Dengue Spread Information System (DSIS), a geographic-health information system designed to highlight the spread of dengue cases in Iquitos, Peru, and San Juan, Puerto Rico from 1990 to 2013. The application is aimed at citizens, travelers, policymakers and researchers to analyze and interpret the change in risk factors leading to dengue outbreaks and develop essential early warning applications and policies to counter future dengue outbreaks.
The application portrays an interactive map for the two cities with additional information about temperature and humidity. The application is accompanied by exploratory data analysis on several risk factors impacting Dengue spread which can aid and facilitate research in the domain so that Dengue spread can be prevented.
Karan Bhanot is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at RPI. He has been actively working on several projects including MortalityMinder, CovidMinder, Synthetic Data Generation and Vector-borne Disease analysis. Being a technical writer, he blogs on Medium about projects, ideas, data and much more. He is quite active on GitHub, where he houses his Open Source projects and works with organizations. He is proficient in Python and R, and front-end languages such as HTML, Javascript and CSS.