We observed that individuals living outside of known endemic foci experienced longer delays to diagnosis, suggesting that pursuing efficiency with increasingly targeted surveillance effort may allow sporadic cases in peripheral areas to perpetuate transmission undetected 🔎

Visceral leishmaniasis can be challenging to diagnose, meaning people can suffer symptoms and perpetuate transmission for months before accessing treatment. We explored how such delays can vary not only by individual characteristics but also over space, relative to where interventions are targeted 🎯

...and links to subsequent investigation of the spatial bias induced in delayed diagnosis as a result of targeted surveillance effort:
doi.org/10.1101/2024...

This follows on from earlier work forecasting VL diagnoses at the coarser, sub-district level: journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

Estimating village incidence using a disaggregation approach was no better than simply applying the observed areal rates to each constituent village, suggesting that patterns on this spatial scale really need to be understood from data collected directly at that level.

This was a rare opportunity to compare disaggregation estimates against data observed at the finer scale, but we found that the village-targeted surveillance process for VL meant that accuracy was still challenging to interpret.

It's a very recent development so don't worry! Been deliberating the value of joining after having freed myself from the "other" place... 🐤