Abstract
Interannual climate variability patterns associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon result in climate and environmental anomaly conditions in specific regions worldwide that directly favor outbreaks and/or amplification of variety of diseases of public health concern including chikungunya, hantavirus, Rift Valley fever, cholera, plague, and Zika. We analyzed patterns of some disease outbreaks during the strong 2015–2016 El Niño event in relation to climate anomalies derived from satellite measurements. Disease outbreaks in multiple El Niño-connected regions worldwide (including Southeast Asia, Tanzania, western US, and Brazil) followed shifts in rainfall, temperature, and vegetation in which both drought and flooding occurred in excess (14–81% precipitation departures from normal). These shifts favored ecological conditions appropriate for pathogens and their vectors to emerge and propagate clusters of diseases activity in these regions. Our analysis indicates that intensity of disease activity in some ENSO-teleconnected regions were approximately 2.5–28% higher during years with El Niño events than those without. Plague in Colorado and New Mexico as well as cholera in Tanzania were significantly associated with above normal rainfall (p < 0.05); while dengue in Brazil and southeast Asia were significantly associated with above normal land surface temperature (p < 0.05). Routine and ongoing global satellite monitoring of key climate variable anomalies calibrated to specific regions could identify regions at risk for emergence and propagation of disease vectors. Such information can provide sufficient lead-time for outbreak prevention and potentially reduce the burden and spread of ecologically coupled diseases.
Highlights
Interannual climate variability patterns associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon result in climate and environmental anomaly conditions in specific regions worldwide that directly favor outbreaks and/or amplification of variety of diseases of public health concern including chikungunya, hantavirus, Rift Valley fever, cholera, plague, and Zika
The first indications of strong El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions emerged in spring 2015, having started to develop in the late fall on 2014, as demonstrated by increasingly high sea surface temperature (SST) in the NINO 3.4 region at the time (Fig. 1a – right panel, see Materials and Methods for NINO 3.4 region definition)
We further found that higher plague annual intensity was associated with higher rainfall anomaly (P < 0.05), but we did not find any significant association with land surface temperature (LST) anomaly (Table 3) even though lower-than-normal LSTs were observed during this period as would be expected during such an El Niño event
Summary
Interannual climate variability patterns associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon result in climate and environmental anomaly conditions in specific regions worldwide that directly favor outbreaks and/or amplification of variety of diseases of public health concern including chikungunya, hantavirus, Rift Valley fever, cholera, plague, and Zika. On an interannual time scale, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon has profound impacts on global climate and weather anomaly patterns, often defining major peaks in spatial and temporal dimensions of drought and flood conditions[3,4,5,6] These extremes in precipitation and temperature resulting from ENSO events are known to be the background drivers of a range of vector- and water-borne diseases, and coral diseases, whose peaks in activity coincide, lag, or follow precipitation and temperature departures from normal[5,6,7,8,9,10,11].
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