According to a publication by National Geographic, as disease transmitters thrive in heat, an increase in the Earth’s average temperature may favor their proliferation. Also, according to “Saúde em Foco”, when observing the ecology of vectors related to tropical diseases, one can see a strong relationship with high temperatures, high relative humidity, the duration of the summer season or heat and humidity conditions. In addition, rain cycles change with the increase in cases. In the case of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, such as dengue fever, chikungunya, Zica and malaria, increased precipitation leads to greater stagnant water points, which are ideal habitats for the development of mosquito larvae.
In an interview with the National Geographic website, Christovam Barcellos, a researcher at the Health Information Laboratory at the Institute of Scientific and Technological Communication and Information in Health at Fiocruz (Lis/Icic), stated that there is a strong correlation between the climate crisis and tropical diseases. “We are observing an increasingly hot and humid climate, which is a very favorable scenario for diseases such as Dengue to increase their area and degree of incidence”, he states.
According to the authors of the article “YOLOV7 for mosquito breeding grounds detection and tracking”, Camila Laranjeira and Daniel Andrade, from the Department of Computer Science (DCC) at UFMG and Jefersson A. dos Santos, from the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, with With the imminent threat of climate change, chronic diseases such as Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya have the potential to become an even greater global concern. “Remote sensing technologies can help control the spread of Aedes Aegypti, the vector that transmits these diseases, by automating the detection and mapping of local mosquito breeding sites, so that local entities can intervene appropriately. In this work, we leverage YOLOv7, a state-of-the-art software and nationally efficient detection approach, to locate and track mosquito outbreaks in videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicles. We experimented with a dataset released to the public as part of the ICIP 2023 grand challenge titled Automatic Detect-creating mosquito breeding sites. We show that YOLOv7 can be directly applied to detect larger focus categories, such as swimming pools, tires and water tanks, and an inexpensive and simple frame-by-frame detection aggregation method can incorporate assessing time consistency in the tracking process,” they explained.