2023 NTD Innovation Prize winner | Citizen science for mapping snail-borne diseases

Proposal 

Snail-borne diseases such as schistosomiasis and fasciolosis pose a significant public and veterinary health burden, particularly in Africa. Since drug treatment alone does not suffice to control these diseases, the World Health Organization recommends including snail control and community involvement. However, the lack of snail experts and snail distribution data hampers the design and implementation of targeted control measures. Moreover, snail control will simultaneously tackle animal diseases transmitted by the same or related snail species, aligning with the One Health approach.

To tackle these challenges, the winning project proposed a groundbreaking approach using citizen science (CS) to bridge this gap by involving community members in snail monitoring. Two CS networks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have collected weekly snail data and information on water-related activities at 76 fixed-water contact sites between 2020-2023. This data will be used to identify potential transmission sites. However, to identify actual transmission sites, the research team now want to combine field-friendly environmental (e)DNA sampling with loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to measure parasite transmission in real-time (eLAMP)

In the Action Towards Reducing Aquatic snail-borne Parasitic diseases (ATRAP) initiative, the research team developed a robust validation protocol to ensure accurate spatial and temporal mapping. The team showed through advanced comparative analyses that CS-collected and expert data substantially agree regarding the presence or absence of snails at a given site (Tumusiime et al, submitted). In addition, the CS model is about eight times cheaper than the conventional expert monitoring. Now they want to use snail and eLAMP data to develop advanced distribution models that predict the presence of snails/parasites based on environmental conditions obtained from novel remote sensing products and state-of-the art COSMO-CLM simulations. The raw data will be used to generate real-time risk maps, while fine-scaled spatio-temporal modelling will provide future forecasting of snail/parasite presence considering extreme hydrological events and long-term environmental fluctuations driven by climate change.

The project aims to create an open-access platform to maximize data accessibility. This citizen science approach has been shown to generate unprecedented snail datasets regarding spatiotemporal resolution and coverage. Incorporating eLAMP has the potential to turn it into a powerful early warning system for disease risk. The ATRAP research team earlier work has shown that citizen participation empowers communities and increases knowledge of snail-borne diseases and their control and prevention. They therefore argue that this community-based approach presents a highly innovative and sustainable addition to classical surveillance programs, or even a replacement in remote areas. Finally, this project has a huge potential for upscaling to other regions in Africa and beyond.