Publications related to Sub-Saharan Africa

Relating health benefits of water, sanitation, and hygiene services with the context of urban informal settlements: lessons from Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya

This thesis is inscribed in the recent efforts to reconnect urban planning and public health. It focused on the context of sub-Saharan African cities, for they offer invaluable lessons regarding environmental health determinants and potential solutions to ...

EPFL2023

Back-to-Africa introductions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the main cause of tuberculosis in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Jacques Fellay, Zhi Ming Xu

In settings with high tuberculosis (TB) endemicity, distinct genotypes of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) often differ in prevalence. However, the factors leading to these differences remain poorly understood. Here we studied the MTBC populat ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

A new Analleucosma Antoine, 1989 from West Africa (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae, Cetoniinae)

Michele De Palma

The genus Analleucosma Antoine, 1989 is known from northeastern and southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and a few localities in East Africa; it currently comprises three similar species, all very scarce in collections. Here I describe a new species, ...

2022

Point-of-care ultrasound for tuberculosis management in Sub-Saharan Africa-a balanced SWOT analysis

Mary-Anne Hartley

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is an increasingly accessible skill, allowing for the decentralization of its use to nonspecialist healthcare workers to guide routine clinical decision-making. The advent of ultrasound-on-a-chip has transformed the technol ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2022

Fine-grained population mapping from coarse census counts and open geodata

Devis Tuia, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger, Muhammad Imran

Fine-grained population maps are needed in several domains, like urban planning, environmental monitoring, public health, and humanitarian operations. Unfortunately, in many countries only aggregate census counts over large spatial units are collected, mor ...

Nature Research2022

Characterizing human mobility patterns in rural settings of sub-Saharan Africa

Andrea Rinaldo, Theophile Mande, Francisco Javier Perez Saez

Human mobility is a core component of human behavior and its quantification is critical for understanding its impact on infectious disease transmission, traffic forecasting, access to resources and care, intervention strategies, and migratory flows. When m ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2021

Comprendre la construction des périphéries urbaines à Lomé et Yaoundé

Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda

Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa is mainly marked by an extremely high speed. For a couple of decades, it has become more and more difficult to study and control the urbanization processes using the available means due to their rapidity. These conditions ...

EPFL2020

A New Approach to the Collection and Spatial Analysis of Land Values in Lomé and Yaoundé

Jérôme Chenal, Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda, Martí Bosch Padrós

Understanding the land market is crucial when analyzing the spatial dynamics of cities. Spatial models, which are widely used to describe the growth of cities, are underdeveloped in Africa, due in part to the lack of urban data and/or the difficulty of col ...

2020

Detection of dicistroviruses RNA in blood of febrile Tanzanian children

Mary-Anne Hartley, Thomas Junier

Fever is the leading cause of paediatric outpatient consultations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although most are suspected to be of viral origin, a putative causative pathogen is not identified in over a quarter of these febrile episodes. Using a de novo assembl ...

2019

Regional variation in the rural-urban fertility gradient in the developing world

Mathias Lerch

The study of regional trends in the rural-urban fertility gradient helps us to understand the pace of completion of the fertility transition and the geography of urban growth in the global South. We question whether the hypothesized inverted U-shaped evolu ...

2019

A field-based modelling framework of the ecohydrology of schistosomiasis

Francisco Javier Perez Saez

Successful control of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease, is challenged by the intricacy of the wormâ s lifecycle, which depends on aquatic snail intermediate hosts, and involves environmental, ecologic, and socio-economic factors. Current s ...

EPFL2018

Preface: Special Section on Energy and Food Security in a Humanitarian Context

Silvia Hostettler

Natural disasters, population growth, social conflicts, and political or structural crises give rise to forced migrations, which can lead to humanitarian emergencies. According to the “UNHCR annual global trends report”, 65.6 million people were displaced ...

2017

Classification and prediction of river network ephemerality and its relevance for waterborne disease epidemiology

Andrea Rinaldo, Natalie Claire Ceperley, Theophile Mande, Francisco Javier Perez Saez

The transmission of waterborne diseases hinges on the interactions between hydrology and ecology of hosts, vectors and parasites, with the long-term absence of water constituting a strict lower bound. However, the link between spatio-temporal patterns of h ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2017

Made by China: the transformation of an African city : a visual exploration of the Light Rail Transit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Alexandra Belinesh Thorer

Over the past two decades China has become increasingly involved in Africa. From rising trade and investment capital to a rapid climb in industrial and construction activity, a new foundation has been laid for Africaâ s development. While Africaâ s econo ...

EPFL2015

Evaluation and Comparison of Current Fetal Ultrasound Image Segmentation Methods for Biometric Measurements: A Grand Challenge

Meritxell Bach Cuadra, Xavier Bresson, Anca-Ramona Ciurte

This paper presents the evaluation results of the methods submitted to Challenge US: Biometric Measurements from Fetal Ultrasound Images, a segmentation challenge held at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2012. The challenge was set to ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2014

A bottom-up stochastic model to predict building occupants' time-dependent activities

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, Darren Robinson, Frédéric Haldi, Urs Wilke

A bottom-up modelling approach together with a set of calibration methodologies is presented to predict residential building occupants' time-dependent activities, for use in dynamic building simulations. The stochastic model to predict activity chains is c ...

Elsevier2013

Reuse of domestic wastewater treated in macrophyte ponds to irrigate tomato and eggplant in semi-arid West-Africa: benefits and risks

André Mermoud

The scarcity of freshwater resources is a critical problem in semi-arid zones and marginal quality water is increasingly being used in agriculture. This paper aimed at evaluating the physico-chemical and biological risks on irrigated soils and fruits of ma ...

Elsevier2011

Strategies for regional integration of electricity supply in West Africa

Edgard Gnansounou, Jun Dong, Denis Bednyagin

To improve peoples’ living conditions in West African countries national governments have to considerably reinforce the electricity supply infrastructures. Rehabilitation of the existing installations and construction of new power generation facilities and ...

2007

Helio-photocatalytic enhancement of the biodegradation of biorecalcitrant pollutants in water : physicochemical and technical aspects

Simeon Kenfack

The importance of the photocatalytic treatment of water is continuously growing since the 80s. In spite of the well management of the existing biological water treatment plants and the constant reinforcement of the wastewater discharge standards, the devel ...

EPFL2006

Cross section investigations of compositions and sub-structures of tips obtained by focused electron beam induced deposition

Philippe Buffat, Patrik Willi Hoffmann, Marco Cantoni, Christian Santschi, Danièle Laub, Johann Michler, Ivo Utke

The spatial evolution of compositions and sub-structures inside focused-electron-beam-deposited tips from dicobalt-octacarbonyl Co2(CO)8 precursor at 25 keV and varying beam current (20 pA - 3 A) is extensively studied for the first time by means of energy ...

2005