Modelled and observed mean and seasonal relationships between climate, population density and malaria indicators in Cameroon
Abstract Background A major health burden in Cameroon is malaria, a disease that is sensitive to climate, environment and socio-economic conditions, but whose precise relationship with these drivers is still uncertain. An improved understanding of the relationship between the disease and its drivers...
| Published in: | Malaria Journal |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
BMC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12936-019-2991-8 https://doaj.org/article/cfac939f4d004340af8f34ca4428580e |
| Summary: | Abstract Background A major health burden in Cameroon is malaria, a disease that is sensitive to climate, environment and socio-economic conditions, but whose precise relationship with these drivers is still uncertain. An improved understanding of the relationship between the disease and its drivers, and the ability to represent these relationships in dynamic disease models, would allow such models to contribute to health mitigation and adaptation planning. This work collects surveys of malaria parasite ratio and entomological inoculation rate and examines their relationship with temperature, rainfall, population density in Cameroon and uses this analysis to evaluate a climate sensitive mathematical model of malaria transmission. Methods Co-located, climate and population data is compared to the results of 103 surveys of parasite ratio (PR) covering 18,011 people in Cameroon. A limited set of campaigns which collected year-long field-surveys of the entomological inoculation rate (EIR) are examined to determine the seasonality of disease transmission, three of the study locations are close to the Sanaga and Mefou rivers while others are not close to any permanent water feature. Climate-driven simulations of the VECTRI malaria model are evaluated with this analysis. Results The analysis of the model results shows the PR peaking at temperatures of approximately 22 °C to 26 °C, in line with recent work that has suggested a cooler peak temperature relative to the established literature, and at precipitation rates at 7 mm day−1, somewhat higher than earlier estimates. The malaria model is able to reproduce this broad behaviour, although the peak occurs at slightly higher temperatures than observed, while the PR peaks at a much lower rainfall rate of 2 mm day−1. Transmission tends to be high in rural and peri-urban relative to urban centres in both model and observations, although the model is oversensitive to population which could be due to the neglect of population movements, and differences in hydrological ... |
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