Lauren Gardner, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, recently has worked with a team of researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, Queensland University of Technology, and Queensland Health to develop a new tool to predict the global spread of human infectious diseases, like dengue, and track them to their destination.

The tool is a network model that draws on travel data from the International Air Transportation Association and dengue incidence rates from the Global Health Data Exchange to derive new insights about the spreading dynamics of dengue, a mosquito-borne disease.

The team’s findings shed light onto dengue importation routes and reveal country-specific reporting rates that have been until now largely unknown. This research provides important new knowledge about the spreading dynamics of dengue that is highly beneficial for public health authorities to strategically allocate the often limited resources to more efficiently prevent the spread of dengue.