One of the most exciting things happening with EpiSurveyor in the last year has been the huge increase in users -- to more than 5000 worldwide -- but a particularly exciting bit is the expansion into non-health fields by word-of-mouth from happy users.

Researchers Magaly Blas and Isaac Alva at the Unit of HIV and STD epidemiology at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru have been using EpiSurveyor to assess the association between the Human Papilloma Virus and the Human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV) in indigenous women from the Peruvian Amazon. These researchers want to see if HTLV has a similar behavior as HIV with regards to increasing risk for cervical cancer.

Case study from MSH entitled "Applying or Integrating Mobile-based Episurveyor Technology into Malawi Malaria Supervision", in which they describe using EpiSurveyor for field data collection and analysis in Malawi.  Our favorite excerpt:

Courtesy of our friends at John Snow, Inc: a terrific case report about using EpiSurveyor for the President's Malaria Initiative in Zambia. Favorite quotes:

"The use of the mobile phones in data collection should be encouraged in future. This will make data gathering, analysis and result generation quicker and done in near real time."

Health researchers in Cameroon, led by Dr. Mbah Patrick Okwen (health consultant to the Netherlands Development Organization) have been using EpiSurveyor for the last few years to collect critical data concerning a variety of topics including child nutritional status monitoring, community mutual health organizations, investigating governance at hospitals, and watershed and grazing pastures mapping to reduce water contamination and conflict.  Without the need for any international consultants!

October's EpiSurveyor case study comes to us from Ontario, Canada: The Animal Health Laboratory (AHL) at the University of Guelph and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) have two pilot projects using EpiSurveyor to collect agricultural data in rural areas.