INVESTIGADORES
LANERI Karina Fabiana
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Epidemic malaria and Monsoon rains in North-West India
Autor/es:
KARINA LANERI; ANINDYA BHADRA; EDWARD L. IONIDES; MERCEDES PASCUAL
Lugar:
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Reunión:
Conferencia; Department Seminar EEB; 2010
Institución organizadora:
University of Michigan
Resumen:
Malaria epidemics in regions with seasonal windows of transmission can vary greatly in size from year to year. A central question has been whether these interannual cycles are driven by climate, are instead generated by the intrinsic dynamics of the disease, or result from the resonance of these two mechanisms. We propose here a quantitative approach to formally compare rival hypotheses on climate vs. disease dynamics, or external forcings vs. internal feedbacks, that combines dynamical models with recently developed, computational inference methods. The interannual patterns of epidemic malaria are investigated here for desert regions of NW India, with extensive epidemiological records for Plasmodium falciparum malaria for the past two decades. We formulate a dynamical model of malaria transmission that explicitly incorporates rainfall, and we rely on recent advances on parameter estimation for nonlinear and stochastic dynamical systems based on sequential Monte Carlo methods. Results show a significant effect of rainfall in the inter-annual variability of epidemic malaria that involves a threshold in the disease response.