Juan de Monasterio edited o_section_Introduction_Chagas_disease__.tex  almost 8 years ago

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Chagas' disease is a tropical parasitic epidemic of global reach, spread mostly across Latin America. The World Health Organization (WHO \ref{http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs340/en/}) estimates more than six million infected people worldwide. Most transmissions occur in the Americas via the \textit{Trypanosoma cruzi} parasite, vector-borne by the \textit{Triatomine} insect family. In recent years and due to globalization and migrations, the disease has become a health issue in other continents, particularly in Europe.   Relevant routes of transmission also include blood transfusion and congenital transmission, estimating 1300 newborns infected each year \ref{trabajos_de_}.\begin{comment} en el drive estan las ppt del min salud \end{comment}. The diseases disease  endures chronically in the infected individual, lasting for years without being detected. This characteristic vastly reduces the chance of effective treatment and the tracking of infected individuals. Also, the spatial dissemination of a congenitally transmitted disease sidesteps the available measures to control risk groups and slowly introduces the disease to the general population. In this process, long-term human mobility plays a key role. In Argentina vector control campaigns have been ongoing for more than thirty years as the main epidemic counter-measure.The \textit{Gran Chaco}, situated in the northern part of the country, is home to most of the infected triatomines. The ecoregion's low socio-demographic conditions further supports the parasite's lifecycle, where domestic interactions between humans, triatomines and animals foster the appearance of new infection cases, particularly among the poorest. The ecoregion as of today is hyperendemic for the disease. 

Other works directly study CDRs to characterize human mobility and other sociodemographic information. \footnote{A complete survey of mobile traffic analysis articles may be found in Fiore, Naboulsi, Ribot & Stanica's work} Antenna usage is mostly explored in Sarraute et al. \ref{mobile_survey} to automatically detect large social-events in real time. Using the social graph to   Here we explore the use CDRs to predict population movements between the \textit{Gran Chaco} ecoregion to the rest of the country, thus providing a proxy for the epidemic spread. Characterization of human movements to and from the ecoregion is key to the problem of targetting targeting  infected individuals at a national scale. To the best of our knowledge, data on the subject is vastly lacking, inexistent or hardly accesible accessible  to researchers. 1