Abstract
Malaria remains a major public health threat to more than 600 million Africans and its control is recognized as critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The greatest burden of malaria in Africa occurs in the endemic regions where the disease pathogen is continuously present in the community. These regions are characterized by an environment that is conducive to interactions between the Anopheles mosquito, malaria parasites and human hosts, as well as housing of generally poor quality, which offers little protection from mosquito-human contact. Epidemic malaria tends to occur along the geographical margins of endemic regions, when the equilibrium between the human, parasite and mosquito vector populations is occasionally disturbed and a sharp but temporary increase in disease incidence results. When malaria control measures are inadequate, as is the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the disease distribution is closely linked with seasonal patterns of the climate and local environment. In the absence of good epidemiological data on malaria distribution in Africa, climate information has long been used to develop malaria risk maps that illustrate the boundaries of 'climatic suitability for endemic transmission.' The best known of these are produced by the Pan-African-based MARA Collaboration. This paper describes the development of additional malaria suitability maps which have been produced in an online, interactive format to enable temporal information (i.e., seasonality of climate conditions) to be queried and displayed along with spatial information. These maps and the seasonal information that they contain should be useful to the malaria control and health service communities for their planning and operational activities.
Highlights
Malaria remains a major public health threat to the African continent and its control is critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in this region
Epidemic malaria tends to occur along the geographical margins of the endemic regions, when the conditions supporting the equilibrium between the human, parasite and mosquito vector populations are disturbed
While economic development has played an enormous role in shaping the current distribution of endemic malaria, the seasonal characteristics of climate have a significant relationship with the distribution and seasonality of the disease where control efforts have been largely unsuccessful
Summary
Malaria remains a major public health threat to the African continent and its control is critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in this region. Epidemic malaria tends to occur along the geographical margins of the endemic regions, when the conditions supporting the equilibrium between the human, parasite and mosquito vector populations are disturbed This leads to a sharp but temporary increase in disease incidence. Risk maps and seasonal calendars for endemic malaria control planning In the absence of good epidemiological data on malaria distribution in Africa, climate information has long been used to develop malaria risk maps that illustrate the boundaries of 'climatic suitability for endemic transmission' Such maps date back at least one hundred years [5]. Mosquitoes will generally not live long enough to complete their transmission cycle where and when the relative humidity is consistantly less than 60% [9,11] In endemic regions these three variables usually create conditions suitable for malaria transmission every year. In the epidemic prone regions one of these variables is typically not sufficient to support transmission
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