Geospatial tools and chagas control: A critical comment on the paper of Weinberg et al., evaluation and planning of chagas control activities using geospatial tools. geospat health 2019;14:229-238

Abstract

The contribution of the geospatial tools to the vector control activities of Chagas disease is very clear for the academic and technology-prone communities, but not so much for the state-dependent health agents (national or provincial) that are ultimately responsible for disease control in Latin America. In spite of many published scientific papers during the last 20 years on the use of geospatial tools for the surveillance and control of Chagas disease, that I started contributing to more than 20 years ago (Gorla et al., 1997), health systems did not widely adopt these tools in their daily routines. The lack of technically skilled personnel within the health agencies may have been one of the causes of the adoption failure. In some other cases, one can identify products of the academic/technical communities that do not give enough attention to study designs that in the end discourages the end-users to adopt the tools.