 So please welcome Tiyanga Shamini Talagala from the University of Srijalya Vardhanapura in Sri Lanka. She will share her dengue data hub, a centralized repository for dengue related data. And we'll start a video here and then Tiyanga will be available for questions. Hello everyone, I'm Tiyanga Talagala from the University of Srijalya Vardhanapura, Sri Lanka. Currently, I'm working as a senior lecturer in the Department of Statistics. In this talk, I'm going to introduce the dengue data hub, a centralized repository for dengue related data. Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral infection ranked among the top 10 global threats by the World Health Organization. One of the challenges we face in combating dengue fever is the absence of a specific treatment. Hence, it is a global issue that demands our attention and concerted efforts. This map shows the dengue endemic areas. Dengue is endemic in most tropical and subtropical countries. The reason is mosquitoes thrive in warm and humid environments. There are some specific weather conditions that are favorable for mosquitoes, include temperature 25 to 30 degrees Celsius, high humidity levels. Mosquitoes require water to lay eggs and complete their life cycle. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in stagnant water resources such as ponds, water-filled containers and even discarded tiles. They often seek shelter in areas with dense vegetation. According to the World Health Organization, about half of the world's population is now at risk of dengue with an estimated 100 to 400 million infections occurring each year. Small bite big threat is the theme of World Health Day in 2014. This describes the potential danger posed by mosquitoes. Hence, it is crucial that we come together, exchange knowledge and explore innovative strategies to tackle dengue fever effectively. Dengue research flow often starts with data collection, next data analysis and finally communication of results. The most time consuming and costly aspect of research is often data collection. To overcome this, I build dengue data hub. Dengue data hub aims to provide a one-stop shop for researchers and public health practitioners looking to gain insight into dengue and improve health outcomes. This project is funded under our consortium ISC grant. I have updated the theme from small bite big threat to small bite a small data big impact to emphasize the potential impact of data in today's world. Now we will look at where this is being established. This is the website dengue data hub netlify.app. Our website provides a home for our dengue data hub. It offers a wealth of resources to support researchers and analysts with a diverse range of examples. Our codes, tutorials and interactive visualizations. We also have an R package. Through this, you can get access to data in the hub. The package is published on CRAN and you can find the development or development version of the package through my GitHub account. To whom? This is for researchers, teachers, epidemiologists, public health officials, medical practitioners, as well as national and international organizations. Dengue data hub provides valuable resources for teachers who are educating students about dengue. Others can use the hub to collaborate with other experts and exchange information. Further, the data can assist them in making informed decisions, implementing, preventing measures and allocating resources effectively to manage dengue outbreak. What do we have and how to use? Currently we have nine data sets. We collected these data based on trusted resources from all over the globe to give you accurate up-to-date information. Let's look at a few of the data sets. This data set is called level of risk. This provides information related to level of risk in each country. We have this information for 47 regions in Africa, 43 regions in America, 26 regions in Asia and 22 regions in Oceania and Pacific Islands. The level of risk, they are classified like this. Next, world data. We have annual dengue incidents for 225 countries from 1990 to 2019. For Sri Lanka, we have weekly dengue counts for all of the districts from 2006 to 2023. The data extracted from weekly epidemiological reports published by the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka. This is a snapshot of the full data set. We have a district name, we have the starting date of the week, end date of the week, year, week number and cases. Next, for China, we have annual dengue incidents from 2005 to 2020. We have dengue cases, number of indigenous dengue cases, number of imported dengue cases, number of counties with dengue fever, number of counties with dengue fever in indigenous and number of counties with dengue fever imported. We also have weekly dengue counts for Singapore. For other data set, please visit the dengue data package or else the website. Furthermore, we have some common functions that are useful for visualizing dengue data. In addition to that, we also have an interactive dashboard to view the data. For those who are not familiar with our coding, they can use the app to download related data. This is a quick demo on how to use the app. Furthermore, we have some interactive data visualizations. Here I visualize the hierarchical relationship in dengue counts for Sri Lanka. Here we have bottom level shows the dengue districts and this level shows the corresponds to the province and this level corresponds to the whole country. When you click, it will show the time series corresponds to dengue counts for that particular district. How to collaborate? You can collaborate by adding data, fixing issues and documentation. I invited researchers, public health practitioners and other interested parties to explore our data set and collaborate with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the video. Our presenter is still available for questions. I'm going to go to the chat here. We have a couple of comments about dengue fever. If you want to say anything about that or if you want to just talk more about the research, then we can also look for some questions in the Q&A here as well. At the moment, I have only the secondary data. I'm currently working on looking at clinical trial data. Publishing clinical trial data is challenging because we need to do some few things to protect data privacy issues. But if anybody would like to share the data, then that would be great. Then the other people can also use the data and they can save their time and cost and they can do more focus to the data analysis and data visualization rather than spending their time on data collection. And the other people can also have also look into the same data set in a different angle. The next question we have is from Peter Higgins. Are there overall longitudinal trends? Yes, we have longitudinal trends and we also have a pattern of the time series data. The strength of seasonality is very high because dengue is very much associated with the climatic factors. We have a strong seasonality as well as a strong trend pattern. The next question comes from Breanna Hoffman. Is there more information on the website about adding your own data to the hub? Yes, I have linked the website to my GitHub account. So if anybody wants to collaborate, they can open an issue on the GitHub. Also, I have a code of conduct on when it comes to collaboration and use this code of conduct specified on the website. But there is no way to directly add the data to the website. The only way that they can add data is opening an issue on my GitHub account associated to the package, which I can check later and add into the package as a component. Wonderful, thank you. The next question again from Dr. Peter Higgins. Does it appear that there are trends with global warming of dengue cases increasing at higher latitudes or further from the equator? All right, so actually that's a great question. I haven't checked that how these patterns vary according to the longitude and latitude. Yeah, so thank you very much for bringing that out. I should definitely check that out. Yeah. Great, thank you. So next question. Do you use your data to evaluate public health interventions? At the moment I have data related to dengue cases, but I don't have any information related to the public interventions, such as school opening or some festive seasons. I don't have that information for all of the countries at the moment that the hub is purely all of the data sets are purely about the dengue cases or the level of risk specified by the World Health Organization. Great, thank you. I don't know if you want to say anything else about your experience with this. We do have a little more time. If folks want to ask any more questions, we've got another quick question. Is there real world data for the dengue vaccine? What's the question? Is it a data source real world? A new dengue vaccine is approved for use in children aged 9 to 16 years of laboratory confirmed previous dengue virus infection and living in areas where dengue is endemic. Endemic areas include some U.S. territories and freely associated states. The vaccine is not approved for use in U.S. travelers who are visiting but not living in area where dengue is common. And so we're assuming it's only starting to be used in some countries because it was approved in 2021. And so the question again was, is there real world data for the dengue vaccine? This is a news for me because I'm from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is one of the most critical countries that are suffering from dengue. In Sri Lanka, we don't have a vaccine. People are testing on developing a vaccine. So I don't have any information related to the vaccine information, but I will definitely check that out. That would be a valuable addition to the dengue data. Great. And if you have any final remarks, you do have a little bit more time. But the vaccine information was put in the chat there for folks who are following that conversation. And again, folks are saying thank you so much for staying up so late in your time zone. We realize it's, you know, it's quite the commitment to bringing this information to us. So really, really appreciate your talk. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. If you would like to share your data and if you would like to announce the data, if you would like to announce, if you want to add the voice to your data, please feel free to add it into the, please feel free to contact and share it with the world. Thank you very much. Wonderful. And you're getting lots of, lots of appreciation in the chat there too. So I hope you see this. Thank you. Thank you, Tianga.