A recent West Virginia University graduate has published research examining whether it’s more effective to give people money or health care to help them overcome poverty.
Calistus Ngonghala, who earned his doctorate in mathematics in May, collaborated with Mateusz Plucinksi of the University of California at Berkeley, and Matthew H. Bonds of Harvard Medical School on the paper titled, “Health Safety Nets can Break Cycles of Poverty and Disease: a Stochastic Ecological Model.”
The paper, published online in the “Journal of Royal Society Interface” May 18, uses a mathematical model to analyze the impact an enforced minimum level of health and economic support can have on an impoverished community.
The research, Ngonghala said, had personal implications.
“Coming from a part of the world (Cameroon) where a greater portion of the population suffers from extreme poverty and deadly diseases such as malaria, TB and HIV almost all the time,
I fully understand the impact of these on individual lives and economic development,” he said.
“As an applied mathematician, I have always been interested in applying mathematical modeling to assist in the fight against poverty and such mass killer diseases. Poverty and the prevalence of infectious diseases happen to depend on each other.”
Through the study, Ngonghala and his partners adapted a version of an infectious disease model and incorporated a per capita income into the model. They then examined an individual’s susceptibility to disease based on their per capita income.
Their theory — higher income, better nutrition and health-related investments in areas such as sanitation, disease carrier eradication, inoculation and drug therapies tend to reduce infections, while a highly-infected population is less productive, leading to smaller per capita income.
“Within a specific population or country, there are rich and healthy, rich and unhealthy, poor and healthy, and poor and unhealthy individuals,” Ngonghala said.
“My immediate research plan is to extend this research to explore within population or within country disease-driven poverty traps (that will track the income and disease status of individuals within a population or country).”
In addition to his doctorate in mathematics, conducting research in the Department of Chemistry and teaching in the Department of Mathematics, Ngonghala has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with a minor in computer science and a master’s degree from the University of Buea, Cameroon.
In July, he will begin a two-year post-doctoral appointment as a researcher at the newly-created National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
For more information, contact Kenneth Showalter, C. Eugene Bennett Chair in Chemistry, at (304) 293-3435, ext. 6428 or kshowalt@wvu.edu.
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