[ti:Mobile Phones Could Help Efforts to End Malaria] [ar:] [al:TECHNOLOGY REPORT] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]From VOA Learning English, this is the TECHNOLOGY REPORT in Special English. [00:11.89]Researchers are studying the use of mobile phones [00:15.07]to document the spread of malaria. [00:21.24]The study is part of an effort to stop or control the disease. [00:27.10]The World Health Organization says malaria mortality rates [00:32.62]have fallen by twenty-five percent since two thousand. [00:41.15]Yet the disease killed an estimated six hundred fifty-five thousand people in twenty-ten. [00:49.27]Scientists say malaria-carrying mosquitoes cannot travel far on their own. [00:57.21]But the insects can, and do, catch rides in the belongings of people who travel. [01:04.66]Malaria also can be spread by people who come from an area [01:08.53]with large numbers of malaria cases. [01:13.35]They may show no signs of having the disease themselves. [01:19.12]That is what Harvard University researchers discovered in Kenya. [01:25.15]They found that the disease mainly spreads east from the country's [01:31.62]Lake Victoria area with people who travel to the capital, Nairobi. [01:37.79]Researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health reported the finding. [01:44.47]It was based on the mobile phone records of fifteen million Kenyans. [01:51.40]Caroline Buckee is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard school. [01:58.02]She says one of the first steps in stopping malaria is to learn [02:02.83]how human travel might be adding to its spread. [02:09.32]She says it has been difficult to follow large population movements [02:13.25]with methods like government census records. [02:18.15]"But mobile phones offer a really unique way, on an unprecedented scale, [02:21.81]to understand how a whole population is moving around." [02:29.55]In Kenya, the researchers estimated the distance and length of each phone user's trip [02:34.31]away from home. This information was based on messages [02:41.33]to and from the mobile phone carrier's twelve thousand transmission towers. [02:49.54]The researchers then compared that information to a map showing reports of malaria [02:54.76]in different parts of the country. The researchers estimated [03:00.90]each user's probability of being infected in a given area. [03:08.77]They also estimated the likelihood that a visitor to that area would become infected. [03:13.53]The result was a picture showing malaria transmission routes [03:17.86]starting in Lake Victoria. Caroline Buckee says [03:22.61]such evidence could influence malaria control efforts. [03:26.38]"One thing that you could consider is sending text messages [03:30.19]to people coming to high risk cell towers, for example, [03:32.30]reminding them to use a bed net. [03:35.96]And I think those types of approaches are simple [03:38.87]but they would hopefully target people who are asymptomatic [03:41.04]and unaware that they are carrying parasites." [03:45.85]She says researchers are investigating using mobile phone records [03:51.51]in other areas to help identify malaria transmission routes. [03:56.69]A report on the study was published in the Journal Science.