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Researchers are studying the use of mobile phones to document the spread of malaria. The study is part of an effort to stop or control the disease. The World Health Organization says malaria mortality rates have fallen by twenty-five percent since two thousand. Yet the disease killed an estimated six hundred fifty-five thousand people in twenty-ten. Scientists say malaria-carrying mosquitoes cannot travel far on their own. But the insects can, and do, catch rides in the belongings of people who travel. Malaria also can be spread by people who come from an area with large numbers of malaria cases. They may show no signs of having the disease themselves. That is what Harvard University researchers discovered in Kenya. They found that the disease mainly spreads east from the country’s Lake Victoria area with people who travel to the capital, Nairobi. Researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health reported the finding. It was based on the mobile phone records of fifteen million Kenyans. Caroline Buckee is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard school. She says one of the first steps in stopping malaria is to learn how human travel might be adding to its spread. She says it has been difficult to follow large population movements with methods like government census records. “But mobile phones offer a really unique way, on an unprecedented scale, to understand how a whole population is moving around.” | 
