Forecasting Zoonotic Infectious Disease Response to Climate Change: Mosquito Vectors and a Changing Environment
by
Andrew W. Bartlow 1
, Carrie Manore 2, Chonggang Xu 3, Kimberly A. Kaufeld 4, Sara Del Valle 2, Amanda Ziemann 5, Geoffrey Fairchild 2 and Jeanne M. Fair 1,*
Andrew W. Bartlow 1, Carrie Manore 2, Chonggang Xu 3, Kimberly A. Kaufeld 4, Sara Del Valle 2, Amanda Ziemann 5, Geoffrey Fairchild 2 and Jeanne M. Fair 1,*
1
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Biosecurity and Public Health, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
2
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Information Systems and Modeling, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
3
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Earth Systems Observations, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
4
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Statistical Sciences, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
5
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Space Data Science and Systems, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Vet. Sci. 2019, 6(2), 40; https://doi.org/10.3390/vetsci6020040
Received: 9 March 2019 / Revised: 12 April 2019 / Accepted: 29 April 2019 / Published: 6 May 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Role of the Environment in the Spread and Maintenance of Zoonotic Pathogens)
Infectious diseases are changing due to the environment and altered interactions among hosts, reservoirs, vectors, and pathogens. This is particularly true for zoonotic diseases that infect humans, agricultural animals, and wildlife. Within the subset of zoonoses, vector-borne pathogens are changing more rapidly with climate change, and have a complex epidemiology, which may allow them to take advantage of a changing environment. Most mosquito-borne infectious diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes in three genera: Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex, and the expansion of these genera is well documented. There is an urgent need to study vector-borne diseases in response to climate change and to produce a generalizable approach capable of generating risk maps and forecasting outbreaks. Here, we provide a strategy for coupling climate and epidemiological models for zoonotic infectious diseases. We discuss the complexity and challenges of data and model fusion, baseline requirements for data, and animal and human population movement. Disease forecasting needs significant investment to build the infrastructure necessary to collect data about the environment, vectors, and hosts at all spatial and temporal resolutions. These investments can contribute to building a modeling community around the globe to support public health officials so as to reduce disease burden through forecasts with quantified uncertainty.
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Keywords:
infectious disease; zoonotic; mosquito; vector-borne; climate change; range expansion; epidemiology
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Bartlow, A.W.; Manore, C.; Xu, C.; Kaufeld, K.A.; Del Valle, S.; Ziemann, A.; Fairchild, G.; Fair, J.M. Forecasting Zoonotic Infectious Disease Response to Climate Change: Mosquito Vectors and a Changing Environment. Vet. Sci. 2019, 6, 40.
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