Climate variability and malaria epidemics in the highlands of East Africa (original) (raw)

Malaria resurgence in the East African highlands: temperature trends revisited

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006

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 popu...

Consequences of Climate Variation on Malaria Incidence in Uganda

Journal of Climatology and Weather Forecasting, 2019

Introduction: Temperature and rainfall are assumed to play an important role in the transmission of malaria. According to Zhou simultaneous analysis of the long-term time series of meteorological and parasitological data are critically needed to understand the effects of climate on malaria incidence. However, it would be more plausible to assess the effect of climate variation on the malaria incidence since increase or decrease in the number of malaria cases does not quantify the disease frequency. Objective: This study therefore, seeks to examine the consequences of variation in climatic factors such as temperature and rainfall on the malaria incidence among the Ugandan population. Methods: To account for variation and dynamics in monthly malaria incidence among the Ugandan population, data on environmental factors like minimum and maximum temperature, and rainfall were obtained from Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA) while monthly malaria counts for the period (2006-2...

Malaria trends in Ethiopian highlands track the 2000 ‘slowdown’ in global warming

Nature Communications, 2021

A counterargument to the importance of climate change for malaria transmission has been that regions where an effect of warmer temperatures is expected, have experienced a marked decrease in seasonal epidemic size since the turn of the new century. This decline has been observed in the densely populated highlands of East Africa at the center of the earlier debate on causes of the pronounced increase in epidemic size from the 1970s to the 1990s. The turnaround of the incidence trend around 2000 is documented here with an extensive temporal record for malaria cases for both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in an Ethiopian highland. With statistical analyses and a process-based transmission model, we show that this decline was driven by the transient slowdown in global warming and associated changes in climate variability, especially ENSO. Decadal changes in temperature and concurrent climate variability facilitated rather than opposed the effect of interventions.