Meningitis(脑膜炎) is spreading across West Africa. The brain disease is a threat every year across 21 African countries. Health officials call this area, "the meningitis belt."
Now, scientists have found they can predict and prepare for this and other diseases. How? They use information from satellites going around the Earth.
Every year, dust storms blow across the Sahel area (萨赫勒地区) of Africa. And every year, meningitis crosses the Sahel after the storms. Carlos Perez Garcia-Pando is an atmospheric scientist with the American space agency NASA. He said, "Meningitis has been one of the most feared dry season diseases in Africa for a long time."
The Sahel stretches from the West African nation of Senegal to Ethiopia in the east. Tens of thousands of people across this area get the disease each year. About 10 percent of those infected die from the disease. Another 10 to 20 percent suffer long brain or nerve damage.
Mr. Garcia-Pando says scientists have yet to understand why meningitis appears to follow the seasonal dust storms in the Sahel. But he says experts do have the technology to study the storms. Satellites can watch these storms develop and examine the conditions that create them.
There are not enough vaccines (疫苗)available to protect everyone in the Sahel from meningitis. But Mr. Perez Garcia-Pando says it would help to know when and where the disease will strike.
So he and other researchers developed a system that studies satellite measurements of dust and wind levels across the Sahel. The researchers also need to know the number of cases already identified by the end of the year. Using this information, they found they could predict how bad the next meningitis season would be.
The researchers hope to use satellites in disease prediction as other scientists use them to predict the weather.
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