CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

BackgroundDengue cases have increased during the last decades, particularly in non-endemic areas,and Argentina was no exception in the southern transmission fringe. Althoughtemperature rise has been blamed for this, human population growth, increased traveland inefficient vector control may also be implicated. The relative contribution ofgeographic, demographic and climatic of variables on the occurrence of dengue caseswas evaluated.MethodsAccording to dengue history in the country, the study was divided in two decades, a firstdecade corresponding to the reemergence of the disease and the second includingseveral epidemics. Annual dengue risk was modeled by a temperature-basedmechanistic model as annual days of possible transmission. The spatial distribution ofdengue occurrence was modeled as a function of the output of the mechanistic model,climatic, geographic and demographic variables for both decades.ResultsAccording to the temperature-based model dengue risk increased between the twodecades, and epidemics of the last decade coincided with high annual risk. Denguespatial occurrence was best modeled by a combination of climatic, demographic andgeographic variables and province as a grouping factor. It was positively associatedwith days of possible transmission, human population number, population fall anddistance to water bodies. When considered separately, the classification performance ofdemographic variables was higher than that of climatic and geographic variables.ConclusionsTemperature, though useful to estimate annual transmission risk, does not fully describethe distribution of dengue occurrence at the country scale. Indeed, when takenseparately, climatic variables performed worse than geographic or demographicvariables. A combination of the three types was best for this task.

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