Nick Ruktanonchai

University of Florida | UF

Mobile phone data have been increasingly used over the past decade or more as a pretty reliable indicator of human mobility to measure population movements and the associated changes in terms of population presence and density at multiple spatial and temporal scales. However, given the fact mobile phone data are not available everywhere and are gen...

Targeted public health interventions for an emerging epidemic are essential for preventing pandemics and reducing their impact on health and society. During 2020–2022, China invested significant efforts in strict zero-COVID policies to contain outbreaks of varying scales caused by different SARS-CoV-2 variants. This presented a unique opportunity t...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination are two fundamental approaches to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. Vaccination strategies are generally less costly and socially/economically disruptive than NPI strategies, such as business closures, social distancing, and face mask mandates, as evidenced by highly v...

Following the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in spring 2020, Europe experienced a resurgence of the virus starting in late summer 2020 that was deadlier and more difficult to contain1. Relaxed intervention measures and summer travel have been implicated as drivers of the second wave2. Here, we build a phylogeographic model to evaluate how newl...

Background: Understanding seasonal human mobility at subnational scales has important implications across sciences, from urban planning efforts to disease modelling and control. Assessing how, when, and where populations move over the course of the year, however, requires spatially and temporally resolved datasets spanning large periods of time, wh...

Worldwide governments have rapidly deployed non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the large-scale rollout of vaccines since late 2020. However, the effect of these individual NPI and vaccination measures across space and time has not been sufficiently explored. By the decay ratio in the suppression...

p>Following the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in spring 2020, Europe experienced a resurgence of the virus starting late summer that was deadlier and more difficult to contain. Relaxed intervention measures and summer travel have been implicated as drivers of the second wave. Here, we build a phylogeographic model to evaluate how newly introd...

Following the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in spring 2020, Europe experienced a resurgence of the virus starting late summer that was deadlier and more difficult to contain. Relaxed intervention measures and summer travel have been implicated as drivers of the second wave. Here, we build a phylogeographic model to evaluate how newly introduc...

Objective: To estimate the potential risk and geographic range of Wuhan novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) spread within and beyond China from January through to April, 2020. Design: Travel network-based modelling study. Setting and participants: General population travelling from Wuhan and other high-risk cities in China. Main outcome measures: Based...

Background: A novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) emerged in Wuhan City, China, at the end of 2019 and has caused an outbreak of human-to-human transmission with a Public Health Emergency of International Concern declared by the World Health Organization on January 30, 2020. Aim: We aimed to estimate the potential risk and geographic range of Wuhan no...

Background Historically, malaria had been a widespread disease in China. A national plan was launched in China in 2010, aiming to eliminate malaria by 2020. In 2017, no indigenous cases of malaria were detected in China for the first time. To provide evidence for precise surveillance and response to achieve elimination goal, a comprehensive study i...

Statistics on internal migration are important for keeping estimates of subnational population numbers up-to-date, as well as urban planning, infrastructure development, and impact assessment, among other applications. However, migration flow statistics typically remain constrained by the logistics of infrequent censuses or surveys. The penetration...

Improved understanding of geographical variation and inequity in health status, wealth and access to resources within countries is increasingly being recognized as central to meeting development goals. Development and health indicators assessed at national or subnational scale can often conceal important inequities, with the rural poor often least...

Improved understanding of geographical variation and inequity in health status, wealth and access to resources within countries is increasingly being recognized as central to meeting development goals. Development and health indicators assessed at national or subnational scale can often conceal important inequities, with the rural poor often least...

Background An increase in effective malaria control since 2000 has contributed to a decline in global malaria morbidity and mortality. Knowing when and how existing interventions could be combined to maximise their impact on malaria vectors can provide valuable information for national malaria control programs in different malaria endemic settings....

Background Reliable health metrics are crucial for accurately assessing disease burden and planning interventions. Many health indicators are measured through passive surveillance systems and are reliant on accurate estimates of denominators to transform case counts into incidence measures. These denominator estimates generally come from national c...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162006.].

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 29628 10.1038/srep29628 ; published online: 13 July 2016 ; updated: 14 September 2016 In this Article, the columns in Table 2 are misaligned. The correct Table 2 appears below:

Background Geographic accessibility to health facilities represents a fundamental barrier to utilisation of maternal and newborn health (MNH) services, driving historically hidden spatial pockets of localized inequalities. Here, we examine utilisation of MNH care as an emergent property of accessibility, highlighting high-resolution spatial heterog...

Modelled probability surfaces representing the spatial effect of accessibility at 300 x 300 m. a) Delivery with a skilled birth attendant (SBA) present, b) Four or more antenatal care (ANC) visits at time of delivery, and c) Postnatal care (PNC) received within 48 hours of delivery. (TIF)

Geo-located DHS clusters (N = 3,311) by number of DHS respondents (N = 36,178) and urban versus rural location in five East African countries. (TIF)

Estimated live births in five East African countries. Birth estimates were generated by the WorldPop project (www.worldpop.org) and are shown for the year 2015 at 100 x 100 m resolution. (TIF)

Final health facilities used in analysis (N = 9,314). List includes facility name, owner, and status (all where available), plus latitude, longitude, and ISO codes for study countries. (CSV)

ROC curves for skilled birth attendance (SBA), antenatal care (ANC), and postnatal care (PNC) models, with associated area under the curve (AUC) metrics. (TIF)

Model validation details. (DOCX)

Human mobility continues to increase in terms of volumes and reach, producing growing global connectivity. This connectivity hampers efforts to eliminate infectious diseases such as malaria through reintroductions of pathogens, and thus accounting for it becomes important in designing global, continental, regional, and national strategies. Recent w...

The long-term goal of the global effort to tackle malaria is national and regional elimination and eventually eradication. Fine scale multi-temporal mapping in low malaria transmission settings remains a challenge and the World Health Organisation propose use of surveillance in elimination settings. Here, we show how malaria incidence can be modell...

Background Numerous countries around the world are approaching malaria elimination. Until global eradication is achieved, countries that successfully eliminate the disease will contend with parasite reintroduction through international movement of infected people. Human-mediated parasite mobility is also important within countries near elimination,...

Humans move frequently and tend to carry parasites among areas with endemic malaria and into areas where local transmission is unsustainable. Human-mediated parasite mobility can thus sustain parasite populations in areas where they would otherwise be absent. Data describing human mobility and malaria epidemiology can help classify landscapes into...

Population density with Voronoi polygons around cell towers. Thick gray lines indicate national borders, while thin gray lines within Namibia represent Voronoi polygon (used as patches in our model) borders. Each pixel in the population raster is a 10 x 10km grid square. (TIF)

Adjacency matrix from mobile phone data aggregated to the constituency level. Element [i,j] refers to the proportion of time residents in constituency i spent in constituency j. Rows that sum to zero represent constituencies that had no cell towers within them. (CSV)

The WorldPop-InternalMigration-v1 code can be used to re-produce the Internal Migration Datasets publicly available through the WorldPop Project website (http://www.worldpop.org.uk/data/data_sources/) and WorldPop Dataverse Repository (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RUWQQK). Refer to the Methods page of WorldPop Project website for a brief descripti...

The WorldPop-InternalMigration-v1 code can be used to re-produce the Internal Migration Datasets publicly available through the WorldPop Project website (http://www.worldpop.org.uk/data/data_sources/) and WorldPop Dataverse Repository (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RUWQQK). Refer to the Methods page of WorldPop Project website for a brief descripti...

The WorldPop-InternalMigration-v1 code can be used to re-produce the Internal Migration Datasets publicly available through the WorldPop Project website (http://www.worldpop.org.uk/data/data_sources/) and WorldPop Dataverse Repository (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RUWQQK). Refer to the Methods page of WorldPop Project website for a brief descripti...

Mosquito-borne diseases are a global health priority disproportionately affecting low-income populations in tropical and sub-tropical countries. These pathogens live in mosquitoes and hosts that interact in spatially heterogeneous environments where hosts move between regions of varying transmission intensity. Although there is increasing interest...

In repeated behaviours such as those of feeding and reproduction, past experiences can inform future behaviour. By altering their behaviour in response to environmental stimuli, insects in highly variable landscapes can tailor their behaviour to their particular environment. In particular, female mosquitoes may benefit from plasticity in their choi...

Mosquito-borne diseases pose some of the greatest challenges in public health, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. Efforts to control these diseases have been underpinned by a theoretical framework developed for malaria by Ross and Macdonald, including models, metrics for measuring transmission, and theory of control that...

Following over two decades of research, the malaria vaccine candidate RTS,S has reached the final stages of vaccine trials, demonstrating an efficacy of roughly 50% in young children. Regions with high malaria prevalence tend to have high levels of naturally acquired immunity (NAI) to severe malaria; NAI is caused by repeated exposure to infectious...

In modeling resource choice, resources are commonly categorized as essential, complementary, or substitutable. Most models concerning nonsubstitutable resources have represented each resource as a set of identical options. In reality, nonsubstitutable resources often vary in quality. Biting insects require a bloodmeal host and an oviposition site f...

Mathematical models of mosquito-borne pathogen transmission originated in the early twentieth century to provide insights into how to most effectively combat malaria. The foundations of the Ross-Macdonald theory were established by 1970. Since then, there has been a growing interest in reducing the public health burden of mosquito-borne pathogens a...

Social networks can be organized into communities of closely connected nodes, a property known as modularity. Because diseases, information, and behaviors spread faster within communities than between communities, understanding modularity has broad implications for public policy, epidemiology and the social sciences. Explanations for community form...

Database resulting from application of the questionnaire to models in the inventory

Questionnaire used to catalog biological features of models in the inventory

Bibliography of publications included in the inventory

Tables summarizing results for each question on the questionnaire. Tables appear in order of appearance in the questionnaire, and multiple tables appear for some questions depending on the nature of the associated data. Questions pertaining to organizational details (e.g., author names, publication titles) are excluded from these results

Mathematical models developed for studying malaria dynamics often focus on a single, homogeneous population. However, human movement connects environments with potentially different malaria transmission characteristics. To address the role of human movement and spatial heterogeneity in malaria transmission and malaria control, we consider a simple...

Transmission of human malaria is a complicated dynamic process that involves populations of humans, parasites, and vectors. The first mathematical models of malaria are now more than a century old, and they are still a useful conceptual synthetic description of transmission, but they fail in some important ways. To address some of those failures, m...