Disease vector surveillance in the age of crowdsourcing and social networking

Medical & Veterinary Entomology

Disease vector surveillance in the age of crowdsourcing and social networking

 

Lee William COHNSTAEDT and Elin MAKI

Arthropod-Borne Animal Diseases Research Unit, United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, U.S.A.

 

E-mail : Lee.Cohnstaedt@ars.usda.gov

Social networking and crowdsourcing, two recent internet phenomenon were used to collect Aedes vexans and Culex tarsalismosquitoes were collected throughout their known distributions in North America.  Arthropod surveillance is often limited by a short seasonal window, funding, shortage of collection equipment, and the laborious nature of mosquito collection and species level identification; therefore simultaneous sampling of disease vectors on a continental scale is difficult to achieve. However, using crowdsourcing to break up the geographic area and social networking to find and coordinate local collectors, 453 mosquito populations of were received for the study during the summer of 2011. Mosquito abatement districts, health departments, and individuals (530 total) were contacted by email (320), phone call (142), face-to-face (58), or by other media (10). These contacts demonstrated the value of social networks by recruiting an additional 202 people, a 38% increase. However, the importance of personal contact cannot be understated. Although “face-to-face” contacts represented only 8% of the total contacts, they provided 23% of the mosquito populations. Crowdsourcing and social networking methods for finding, contacting, coordinating, and motivating contacts will be discussed in the presentation. Mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit are not limited by geo-political boundaries, therefore in the future social networking and crowdsourcing may increase coordination and effectiveness of mosquito abatement projects across the target species’ entire geographic distribution.

Keyword: Disease vectors, Social networks, Crowdsourcing, Mosquito collection