Spatial epidemiology of yellow fever: Identification of determinants of the 2016-2018 epidemics and at-risk areas in Brazil

by Benoit de Thoisy, Natalia Ingrid Oliveira Silva, L ívia Sacchetto, Giliane de Souza Trindade, Betânia Paiva Drumond Optimise control strategies of infectious diseases, identify factors that favour the circulation of pathogens, and propose risk maps are crucial challenges for global health. Ecological niche modelling, once relying on an adequate framework and environmental descriptors can be a helpful tool for s uch purposes. Despite the existence of a vaccine, yellow fever (YF) is still a public health issue. Brazil faced massive sylvatic YF outbreaks from the end of 2016 up to mid-2018, but cases in human and non-human primates have been recorded until the beginning of 2020. Here we used both human and mo nkey confirmed YF cases from two epidemic periods (2016/2017 and 2017/2018) to describe the spatial distribution of the cases and explore how biotic and abiotic factors drive their occurrence. The distribution of YF cases largely overlaps for humans and monkeys, and a contraction of the spatial exte nt associated with a southward displacement is observed during the second period of the epidemics. More contributive variables to the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of cases were related to biotic factors (mammal richness), abiotic factors (temperature and precipitation), and some human-related variab les (population density, human footprint, and human vaccination coverage). Both projections of the most favourable conditions showed similar trends with a contraction of the mo...
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research