A new approach to modelling malaria outbreaks points to multiple drivers.
Since the 1970s, malaria epidemics in the highlands of Kenya have become increasingly common. At higher temperatures mosquitoes and their parasitic cargo, Plasmodium falciparum, develop more quickly, but the role of climate in these outbreaks has been controversial. New work suggests that climate change is partly to blame.
Mercedes Pascual at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues used a coupled human–mosquito model to compare disease levels on a Kenyan tea plantation in the presence and absence of climate change1. Temperatures rose by one degree Celsius in the period between 1970 and 2003. Pascual and colleagues modelled the number of expected malaria cases on the plantation over the thirty-three-year period with and without the temperature rise.
Climate change accounted for between one third and 50 per cent of the increase in malaria cases reported between 1970 and 2003. The rest may have been due to development of drug resistance in the parasite and to human migration from the lowlands, where the disease is more prevalent, the authors suggest.
References
Alonso, D. et al. Epidemic malaria and warmer temperatures in recent decades in an East African highland. Proc. Royal Soc. B 10.1098/rspb.2010.2020 (2010)
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Barley, S. Part of the puzzle. Nature Clim Change (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1014
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1014
