Impact of flooding and trash on climate-sensitive infectious diseases

Extreme weather events like flooding are becoming more frequent and severe with climate change. Trash in the environment can amplify infectious disease transmission during floods. Inadequate tools for mapping human exposure to floods and trash limits our understanding of how flood and trash dynamics confer disease risk. Additionally, researchers currently lack reproducible methods to quantify a change in trash abundance to test the impact of trash reduction interventions. This study aims to pilot a novel approach to high-resolution mapping and quantification of flooding and trash using robotic drones. This study will also test the hypothesis that higher flood and trash exposure at the household level increases the risk of climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

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