This is often the case for mapping of schistosomiasis, malaria and soil-transmitted helminthiasis surveys (see information reported in www.thiswormyworld.org for helminths and www.map.ox.ac.uk for malaria), where the cartographical level below the level of village, typically of 4–5 km2 area, is not generally investigated.5, 9, 10, 11 and 12 Nonetheless efforts to collect this fine-scale information have been rewarded

by a deeper understanding of general disease epidemiology, especially the concept of polyparasitism, dynamics of individual host morbidity and local environmental risk.13, 14, 15 and 16 Better knowledge of households’ location, and navigating the small footpaths to find them, also plays an assisting role in better Selleck BMS907351 community mobilization in longitudinal studies, but at the same time raises issues over privacy and participation.17 Alectinib in vitro Developing field applicable methods to map, more rapidly, the location of households is therefore very much needed.18 and 19 Despite ongoing advances in handheld global positioning system (GPS) technology, it is only recently that units have become affordable for more widespread application(s) as this technology has become mainstream and, in so doing, lowered in price.20 Two other contingent factors are also relevant. Firstly, the units themselves have undergone progressive miniaturization

and taken on board data logging capacities, able to store several thousand positional coordinates.21 Secondly, these units can interface with laptop computers running ‘free’ geographical information Docetaxel purchase system (GIS) software such as GoogleEarthTM, which has allowed easy plotting and overlaying of recorded locations onto base maps/high resolution satellite images as never before. Such developments have allowed for a new method in the geospatial sciences known as ‘GPS crowdsourcing’ in which spatial phenomena, e.g., presence of people, roads, and

traffic, are inferred from continual GPS measurements.22 Here, we conduct a point-prevalence study undertaken in mothers and their preschool children in a typical Ugandan village on the shoreline of Lake Victoria. Using handheld GPS-data logging units, we investigate the within-village disease patterning, or spatial micro-epidemiology, of intestinal schistosomiasis, malaria and hookworm. The study was conducted in June 2009 in the lakeshore village of Bukoba (0.311061°N, 33.49240°E), Mayuge District, Uganda on the northern shoreline of Lake Victoria, see Figure 1. This village is one of three selected in Mayuge District where a cohort of mothers and preschool children has been recruited into a longitudinal monitoring study. In this cohort, the infection dynamics of intestinal schistosomiasis, malaria and soil-transmitted helminthiasis are being studied in the face of regular de-worming and home-based management of malaria. Bukoba is spread across an area of approximately 3.