Gps affirmative

*Disease

Bird Flu IL

The Study of Migration Patterns is Key To Tracking Disease Spread

Rocky Mountain Tracking, Daily GPS News, May 6th 2011, http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/2011/05/06/combating-bird-flu-with-gps-tracking/ 

Scientists have used GPS tracking for years to study the migratory patterns of birds and other animals. The devices provide hands on information about the summer and winter movements of animals that could not otherwise be viewed closely enough by humans to gain any significant data. Now, using that same technology, researchers are learning more about the deadly strain of influenza known as H5N1, or bird flu. Bird flu has caused the deaths of hundreds of humans and millions of wild and domestic birds throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa since the year 2003. Until recently, little was known about the origin of the disease or how to track and contain the animals transmitting it. But using the information obtained from GPS tracking devices attached to wild geese along with data regarding outbreak areas, scientists now have a greater base of knowledge with which to form a strategy for combating the deadly virus. Wild geese in China were tagged with transmitters that relayed their location and movements to researchers who followed their migration from Qinghai Lake to Lhasa, Tibet. Using the geographical knowledge they already had of outbreaks in these areas, scientists were able to trace the movement of the disease from known outbreaks in China and Tibet to other parts of the world, carried by the migrating geese. While much research remains to be done on the bird flu outbreaks in order to contain and eventually eliminate it as a threat to humans and domestic fowl, the information gained from tracking technology remains a key component in the overall strategy for pinpointing outbreaks and tracing carriers. The devices worn by wild geese in these studies can relay vital information to researchers by transmitting the location of individual birds to a central computer, enabling scientists to trace not only the individual movements of specific animals, but also their movements relative to the migration of the entire group. The technology has been used not only in this study, but also to monitor movements of endangered species, predatory animals, and invasive species in order to aid scientists in their attempts to understand animal behavior. Without GPS tracking, advances in knowledge regarding bird flu and other diseases could take decades to emerge; with the technology, however, scientists hope to create effective strategies for dealing with H5N1 in order to save both human lives and those of the animals with whom we share the planet. Article Written by Lynetta Bowen; rocky mountain tracking inc.

Pandemics IL

Japan explores using cell phones to stop pandemics

June 7, 2009, JAY Alabaster 9, http://phys.org/news163600177.html

A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls. If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through the student body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school - using mobile phones. The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics. The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server. A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease. The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to get checked out by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections. "The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, who works on infrastructure strategy at Softbank. He demonstrates with a calculation: If an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,500 people would get sick.

AIDS IL

GPS helps control observable characteristics and isolate HIV/AIDS

Gibson & McKenzie 8

(July 2^nd, Not specified; http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2007/04/09/000016406_20070409134246/Rendered/PDF/wps4195.pdf)

The above two examples highlight the ability of GPS to helps researchers to better control for (potentially) observable characteristics. Several recent papers are also using GPS to create instruments for use in instrumental variables estimation.7 The most standard application is to use distance as an instrument. For example, Oster (2006) wishes to examined the response of sexual behavior to HIV prevalence rates in Africa. The concern is that HIV prevalence is endogenous, as places where people have a lot of risky sex are likely to have high rates of HIV prevalence. Her solution is to use the GPS information contained in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to calculate the distance of each cluster to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the HIV virus is thought to have originated. She argues that the spread of the virus should be related to the distance from the DRC, but that after controlling for region, latitude, longitude, and country-level measures of development, distance from the DRC should not otherwise affect sexual behavior. As a further check, she uses data on pre-marital sex to show that distance from the DRC was not correlated with sexual behavior before the spread of HIV occurred.

GPS Solves – Diseases

Disease origins can be tracked with GPS

Mulder ‘11 (Elise Mulder, writer for Earthzine, Tracking Typhoid: How DNA and GPS Partner to Prevent Disease, http://www.earthzine.org/2011/11/11/tracking-typhoid-how-dna-and-gps-partner-to-prevent-disease/)
Typhoid is believed to be a water-borne bacteria, but within that category there are many ways the disease may be spread: Person-to-person contact, unclean food in the home, unclean food vendors, or unfiltered water in public places such as schools. The results of this particular study reveal that the bacteria may cluster around public water spouts. A similar course of discovery took place nearly two centuries ago in the 1840s, when John Snow used interviews, deductive reasoning, and a hand-drawn map to suggest that public pumps might be a key source of spreading cholera in London. Much has changed since Dr. Snow used mapping to investigate cholera hot spots. Today’s researchers share Snow’s goal of disease prevention, but an array of new tools and constantly developing theories of infection aid them in their work. For the study on typhoid in Kathmandu, researchers took blood from 700 Kathmandu patients infected with typhoid. They used DNA sequencing to determine the strain’s genotype for each patient and mapped the patients’ home locations using GPS (Global Positioning System). Mapping shows that outbreaks tend to cluster around water spouts, as reported by SciDev.Net. DNA data helps researchers to determine whether separate typhoid outbreaks are related to one another, which in turn allows for speculation as to how the disease may be spreading. A stronger understanding of sources of disease allows health officials to take more effective action toward the prevention of disease. For example, the Kathmandu study suggests that environmental rather than person-to-person causes may be most responsible for the spread of typhus in Nepal.