An interview with Prof. Shouraseni Sen Roy on ‘Spatial patterns of malaria incidence in India: 1995–2013’

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Could you introduce yourself with your name, where you work, and what your focus is?

I'm Shouraseni Sen Roy. I am a professor at the University of Miami. I teach in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development. My research mainly focuses on climate change. I've been looking at working on climate change trends, mostly in the global south. But recently, I've started working on the impacts of climate change on local communities, sea-level rise, health, and so on.

In regard to this specific research paper, could you tell us a summary and some of the key takeaways?

This research paper is a part of a larger project and is about the impacts of climate change on health and infectious diseases. So, this is a dataset that constitutes more like almost 20 years of data, which is at the county level for India. So that includes more than 500 counties. I'm looking at the spatial patterns of malaria incidents in India. So, at one point, according to the World Health Organization, India was one of the leading countries in terms of the number of malaria cases. The country has taken a lot of measures like early surveillance, trying to control standing water areas, monitoring the local community of population, and providing medication to malaria patients, sooner than later. All these policies have brought down the number of cases and India is no longer so high on the list of malaria cases. So, my study really looks at the spatial patterns over time, how it has changed, where it has gone down, where it has gone up, and what can be potential reasons. A few interesting things that you expected malaria will be high in areas where you have a lot of rainfall, like Eastern India, and those have been the historically endemic areas for malaria. But what we found was that malaria has expanded to the semi-arid areas in the West. The reason for that was because Green Revolution, which brought in irrigation, to grow crops. So, the availability of water made it possible for mosquitoes to breed. And because this population was not aware of malaria, it spread in those areas in western India. Another area that has historically also been very high for malaria incidents is the tribal population in inaccessible north-eastern India because they are mountainous regions. It also rains a lot there. So, surveillance is not good. As a result, malaria incidence is high.

Are there any implications for this particular paper that relate to patient therapies and treatments, and the medical practice? Or is this kind of like a review from a different standpoint?

There are a lot of times when spatially things change, and why my study really made the biggest contribution is that the spatial patterns are different. We use stereotypes like all Americans are a certain way or all Indians are a certain way but here, you're talking about a billion population, you're talking about a large country, and you're talking about different topography, different physiographic settings. So, a one policy fits all take is not very effective. Through this paper, I hope to contribute to the understanding of the local level spatial patterns of malaria incidents, to contribute to how in certain areas malaria cases are rising, and to implement better policies of surveillance to bring down the factors that lead to the increase in malaria. So, I currently have a paper that is also now looking at the impact of the monsoon season which is the main rainfall season. I'm looking at the impact of monsoon rainfall on malaria cases. So, what that will do is that if we know that during a drought year, these are the areas which will have high malaria cases, versus during a heavy monsoon year certain areas will have higher malaria cases, then we can proactively take measures to do more monitoring and do more patient care in those areas, in those parts of the country.

What are the next steps for your research? 

Since I mentioned, that one of the studies I'm looking at is climate change, I do want to go on to more into climate change, especially in India, which is very dependent on rainfall, and we have a very pronounced rainy season. The two things I would like to look at are the impacts of climate change and the impact of urbanization, or land use-land cover change. So as cities are growing, there's a lot of urban migration. In one of my current studies, I'm looking at the low-lying islands in the Bay of Bengal on the India, Bangladesh border. When the local communities here are asked what the impact of COVID has been, they are very confident to say there is no impact. That there's no COVID here. And when asked if there have been any cases, they are unable to say. The only cases that have been here are the people who came from the city. So that indicates the role of migration, of people moving from one place to the other, and that has been a cause of malaria spread also, that is moving those pathogens across different state boundaries in search of employment, and that brings a lot of new diseases in unheard-of places.

You can read and discover Prof. Shouraseni Sen Roy’s research here.

Spatial patterns of malaria incidence in India: 1995–2013 is published in Springer Nature.

Photo Credits: University of Miami

Disclaimer: This is a transcript of a video conversation. You can listen to the recording on Researcher.