Our recent paper in the Journal of Geographic Information System looked at a question that sits underneath a lot of malaria control: not just where the disease is, but whether the tools to fight it are in the right place.
We analyzed 260 weekly surveillance reports from Uganda (2020–2024) and ran Emerging Hot Spot Analysis on two commodities — artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) and rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs). The pattern we called the mismatch contradiction: as treatment understocking eased over time, diagnostic-test deficits stayed roughly tenfold higher. Meanwhile 31 districts read as persistent cold spots of chronic oversupply.
The takeaway is that manual logistics can't reconcile this geographically — the same region can be simultaneously over- and under-supplied depending on the commodity. It's the case for an AI-guided, demand-driven redistribution layer, which is where the next phase of this work is headed.