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      One-year delayed effect of fog on malaria transmission: a time-series analysis in the rain forest area of Mengla County, south-west China

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          Abstract

          Background

          Malaria is a major public health burden in the tropics with the potential to significantly increase in response to climate change. Analyses of data from the recent past can elucidate how short-term variations in weather factors affect malaria transmission. This study explored the impact of climate variability on the transmission of malaria in the tropical rain forest area of Mengla County, south-west China.

          Methods

          Ecological time-series analysis was performed on data collected between 1971 and 1999. Auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were used to evaluate the relationship between weather factors and malaria incidence.

          Results

          At the time scale of months, the predictors for malaria incidence included: minimum temperature, maximum temperature, and fog day frequency. The effect of minimum temperature on malaria incidence was greater in the cool months than in the hot months. The fog day frequency in October had a positive effect on malaria incidence in May of the following year. At the time scale of years, the annual fog day frequency was the only weather predictor of the annual incidence of malaria.

          Conclusion

          Fog day frequency was for the first time found to be a predictor of malaria incidence in a rain forest area. The one-year delayed effect of fog on malaria transmission may involve providing water input and maintaining aquatic breeding sites for mosquitoes in vulnerable times when there is little rainfall in the 6-month dry seasons. These findings should be considered in the prediction of future patterns of malaria for similar tropical rain forest areas worldwide.

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          Most cited references30

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          Climate change and human health: present and future risks.

          There is near unanimous scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity will change Earth's climate. The recent (globally averaged) warming by 0.5 degrees C is partly attributable to such anthropogenic emissions. Climate change will affect human health in many ways-mostly adversely. Here, we summarise the epidemiological evidence of how climate variations and trends affect various health outcomes. We assess the little evidence there is that recent global warming has already affected some health outcomes. We review the published estimates of future health effects of climate change over coming decades. Research so far has mostly focused on thermal stress, extreme weather events, and infectious diseases, with some attention to estimates of future regional food yields and hunger prevalence. An emerging broader approach addresses a wider spectrum of health risks due to the social, demographic, and economic disruptions of climate change. Evidence and anticipation of adverse health effects will strengthen the case for pre-emptive policies, and will also guide priorities for planned adaptive strategies.
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            Climate change and the resurgence of malaria in the East African highlands.

            The public health and economic consequences of Plasmodium falciparum malaria are once again regarded as priorities for global development. There has been much speculation on whether anthropogenic climate change is exacerbating the malaria problem, especially in areas of high altitude where P. falciparum transmission is limited by low temperature. The International Panel on Climate Change has concluded that there is likely to be a net extension in the distribution of malaria and an increase in incidence within this range. We investigated long-term meteorological trends in four high-altitude sites in East Africa, where increases in malaria have been reported in the past two decades. Here we show that temperature, rainfall, vapour pressure and the number of months suitable for P. falciparum transmission have not changed significantly during the past century or during the period of reported malaria resurgence. A high degree of temporal and spatial variation in the climate of East Africa suggests further that claimed associations between local malaria resurgences and regional changes in climate are overly simplistic.
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              Malaria resurgence in the East African highlands: temperature trends revisited.

              The incidence of malaria in the East African highlands has increased since the end of the 1970s. The role of climate change in the exacerbation of the disease has been controversial, and the specific influence of rising temperature (warming) has been highly debated following a previous study reporting no evidence to support a trend in temperature. We revisit this result using the same temperature data, now updated to the present from 1950 to 2002 for four high-altitude sites in East Africa where malaria has become a serious public health problem. With both nonparametric and parametric statistical analyses, we find evidence for a significant warming trend at all sites. To assess the biological significance of this trend, we drive a dynamical model for the population dynamics of the mosquito vector with the temperature time series and the corresponding detrended versions. This approach suggests that the observed temperature changes would be significantly amplified by the mosquito population dynamics with a difference in the biological response at least 1 order of magnitude larger than that in the environmental variable. Our results emphasize the importance of considering not just the statistical significance of climate trends but also their biological implications with dynamical models.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Malar J
                Malaria Journal
                BioMed Central
                1475-2875
                2008
                19 June 2008
                : 7
                : 110
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Stanley Ho Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, School of Public Health, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PR China
                [2 ]Yunnan Province Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Kunming, PR China
                [3 ]Department of Community and Family Medicine, School of Public Health, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PR China
                [4 ]Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, PR China
                [5 ]College of Public Health, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
                [6 ]Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PR China
                [7 ]National Malaria Office, National Institute for Parasitic Diseases, Shanghai, PR China
                Article
                1475-2875-7-110
                10.1186/1475-2875-7-110
                2441628
                18565224
                6bf05195-5c31-4d9d-9d68-f2865b9b32bb
                Copyright © 2008 Tian et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                : 27 April 2008
                : 19 June 2008
                Categories
                Research

                Infectious disease & Microbiology
                Infectious disease & Microbiology

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