AS the Ministry of Health’s Vector Control Services continues its efforts in the elimination of arboviral diseases, staff are being trained on how to use the Geographical Information System (GIS) by a team from the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA).

According to Tashanna Bowman, Focal Point (ag) of the Aedes Borne Diseases Programme, Vector Control Services is one of the new strategies being adopted by the ministry to aid in the elimination of mosquito-borne among other viral diseases.
Bowman was at the time speaking as a guest of the ministry’s Facebook programme, ‘Health Matters’, where she said that a CARPHA team has been teaching local staff about the GIS.
“So, they are coming, and we’re going to go out in the field. What we do now at Control Services is we use paper-based methods… We go out in the field, and we record our data on paper, but GIS now incorporates the use of gadgets,” she said.

Bowman explained that with the implementation of the GIS, processing of data would be faster and more accurate, since using paper allows room for human error.
Aside from errors, they would also have to do mapping, among other activities, so they are grateful to CARPHA, she said, for helping Guyana to improve their system.
Rajesh Ragoo, Head of Vector Borne Diseases (CARPHA), noted that the Vector Control Department has a wide mandate, in that it serves 26 Member States across a range of different activities related to vector borne diseases surveillance.

Concerning the GIS training, he explained that to date, they have done foundational work with the Vector Control Services here in Guyana.
“We started with doing things like integrated training, and then integrating vector management, which forms the basis of the vector control operations,” Ragoo said, adding that this strategy helped build a platform, including entomological surveillance, which they then further strengthened the surveillance techniques used specifically for insecticide resistance testing.
Given this foundation, CARPHA went on to introduce GIS in a response to the moving away from the traditional way of doing things, thereby increasing efficiency in the field, as well as increasing the vector control efforts against Arboviral Disease transmissions, or mosquito-borne disease transmissions.

He explained that with the traditional system, this included inspectors going around to citizen’s properties, checking for mosquito breeding, and recording information on paper, which would then have to be processed, collectively, to determine the risk of transmission in an area.
The GIS eliminates the ‘lag time’ for response to information gathered in a particular area.

“What the GIS does is that it very quickly captures and calculates, giving us ‘info’ very quickly, where we are able to determine the risks of transmission in a particular area,” he said.
Ragoo noted that they are now able to map out areas where mosquitoes are breeding, the types of containers they are found in, and infestation levels for different communities across a range of different vectors.
This allows the Vector Control team to do data-driven, evidence-based, targeted vector control.