Abstract
Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral infection that has spread throughout the tropical world over the past 60 years and now affects over half the world’s population. The geographical range of dengue is expected to further expand due to ongoing global phenomena including climate change and urbanization. We applied statistical mapping techniques to the most extensive database of case locations to date to predict global environmental suitability for the virus as of 2015. We then made use of climate, population and socioeconomic projections for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080 to project future changes in virus suitability and human population at risk. This study is the first to consider the spread of Aedes mosquito vectors to project dengue suitability. Our projections provide a key missing piece of evidence for the changing global threat of vector-borne disease and will help decision-makers worldwide to better prepare for and respond to future changes in dengue risk.
Highlights
Dengue causes the greatest human disease burden of any arbovirus, with an estimated 10,000 deaths[1] and 100million symptomatic infections per year[2] in over 125 countries[1]
In combination with these global trends, rising temperatures attributed to climate change have increased concerns that dengue will intensify in already endemic areas through faster viral amplification, increased vector survival, reproduction and biting rate, leading to longer transmission seasons and a greater number of human infections, more of which are expected to be severe[6,7]
We present projections of the global distribution of dengue in 2020, 2050 and 2080, which address previous limitations by using (1) the most exhaustive and spatially detailed compendium of dengue occurrence locations to date to validate the fitted models; (2) a comprehensive set of socioeconomic and environmental covariates with projections based on the newest Relative Concentration Pathway
Summary
Dengue causes the greatest human disease burden of any arbovirus, with an estimated 10,000 deaths[1] and 100million symptomatic infections per year[2] in over 125 countries[1]. We fit a boosted regression tree (BRT) statistical model based on a total of 13,604 dengue occurrence locations between the years 1960 and 2015 and the following set of covariates to accurately characterize the distribution of dengue: (1) temperature suitability for dengue transmission[11]; (2) cumulative annual precipitation; (3) minimum relative humidity; (4) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita; (5) human population density; (6) environmental suitability for Aedes aegypti from ref.
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