Abstract
Schistosomiasis is a tropical parasitic disease affecting more than 200 million people worldwide, predominantly in Africa. The World Health Organization recently highlighted the importance of targeted control of the freshwater snails acting as intermediate hosts for the parasites causing schistosomiasis. However, because of a shortage of trained experts and resources, detailed information on spatiotemporal snail distributions, which is needed for targeted control measures, is often missing. We explore the potential of citizen science to build these much-needed datasets through fine-grained, frequent snail sampling. We trained a network of 25 citizen scientists to weekly report on snail host abundances in 77 predefined water contact sites in and around Lake Albert (western Uganda). Snail abundance, together with marked GPS locations, water chemistry parameters, and photographs of the identified snails are recorded and submitted using the freely available mobile phone application KoBoToolbox. Trained researchers then engage in remote, semi-automatic validation of the submissions, after which there is an opportunity to provide targeted feedback to the citizen scientists. Five months after the operationalisation of the network, a total of 570 reports were submitted and personalized feedback was given, resulting in lasting improvements in subsequent reporting and snail genus identification. The preliminary results show the possibility of citizen science to independently obtain reliable data on the presence of schistosome snail hosts. We therefore argue that citizen-driven monitoring on a high spatiotemporal resolution could help to generate the much-needed data to support local targeted snail control measures in remote and/or resource-limited environments.
Highlights
Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by parasitic blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma
Apart from the location error, all errors showed a decrease after the personalized feedback provided by 24 June 2020
It was found that incorrect location settings on the smartphones of four citizen scientists led to highly inaccurate GPS readings in 30 of the 346 reports submitted after the suspension, thereby artificially raising the locations flagged as invalid
Summary
Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease caused by parasitic blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma. MDA campaigns do not target the parasite’s population in the very young or the elderly, nor those in the snail hosts Despite these campaigns, reinfection after treatment enables the disease to re-emerge, resulting in a global prevalence as high as it was 50 years ago (Tchuem Tchuenté et al 2017; Sokolow et al 2018). Reinfection after treatment enables the disease to re-emerge, resulting in a global prevalence as high as it was 50 years ago (Tchuem Tchuenté et al 2017; Sokolow et al 2018) Given this unsatisfactory outcome, the World Health Organization recently recommended complementing these MDA campaigns with targeted snail control (WHO 2017). The collection of high-resolution distribution data is hampered by a scarcity in resources and malacological expertise (Shiff 2017; Tchuem Tchuenté et al, 2017; World Health Organization 2017)
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