Criminal profiling 'could control spread of disease'

A type of tool commonly used by the Metropolitan Police and FBI to help catch criminals may be used to control the spread of infectious diseases in the future, experts claim.

The mathematical tool has been adapted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) to help control outbreaks of malaria, and has the potential to target other major diseases.

Usually in serial crime cases, police typically have too many suspects to consider, such as during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK, which generated a total of 268,000 possible culprits.

A such, to help prioritise these investigations, police forces around the world use a technique called geographic profiling, which uses the spatial locations of the crimes to make inferences about the criminal's likely anchor point - usually a home or workplace.

Now, a team led by Dr Steve Le Comber, senior lecturer at QMUL's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, has demonstrated how the maths that underpins geographic profiling can be adapted to target the control of infectious diseases, including malaria.

Using data from an outbreak in Cairo, the scientists show how the new model could use the addresses of patients with malaria to locate the breeding sites of the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.

Writing in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Dr Le Comber explained that experts working in the field had to search almost 300 square km to find seven breeding sites, but the model found the same sites after searching just two-thirds of the area.

"In fact our model found five of the seven sites after searching just 10.7 sq km. This is potentially important since there is a lot of evidence suggesting that the best way to control outbreaks of malaria is to attack the mosquito breeding sites - but it is incredibly difficult to do in practice," he elaborated.

As the mathematical approach only takes minutes to complete on a computer, the method could be used in the early stages of epidemics, when control efforts are most likely to be effective - potentially stopping outbreaks before they spread.

Dr Le Comber concluded: "The model has potential to identify the source of other infectious diseases as well, and we're now working with public health bodies to develop it further for use with TB, cholera and Legionnaires' disease."