Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral infection that has grown rapidly in recent decades, with half the world’s population at risk. Cases of infection number in their millions every year, with half a million hospitalised with severe dengue, of whom about 13,000 lose their lives to the disease.

In Asia, vector control costs over US$300 million annually, while South America spends US 1 billion to control dengue, according to Dhesi Raja, of the Institute for Medical Research Malaysia, who co-invented the system with Rainier Mallol, selected by the UN as a Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals.

The system is known as AIME (Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology). As doctors in the state send in notifications of dengue cases, they feed automatically into the system which then searches through over 90 databases for 276 variables that influence its spread — from local terrain and elevation to roofing types, thunderstorms, water accumulation and population density.

From these, Raja says it deduces where the next outbreaks will be within a 400-metre radius.

In historic comparisons of AIME prediction and actual outbreaks the system has shown 81-84% accuracy.

For more details see the article by Aisling Irvin on SciDevNet