TY - JOUR
T1 - Mathematical modeling of climate change and malaria transmission dynamics
T2 - a historical review
AU - Eikenberry, Steffen E.
AU - Gumel, Abba
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This work is supported, in part, by the Global Security Initiative of Arizona State University. One of the authors (ABG) is grateful to National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) for funding the Working Group on Climate Change and Vector-borne Diseases (VBDs). NIMBioS is an Institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture through NSF Award #EF-0832858, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments, which have significantly enhanced the clarity of the paper. Author SEE is also grateful to Lindsey Van Sambeek for her assistance with Fig. 3.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2018/10/1
Y1 - 2018/10/1
N2 - Malaria, one of the greatest historical killers of mankind, continues to claim around half a million lives annually, with almost all deaths occurring in children under the age of five living in tropical Africa. The range of this disease is limited by climate to the warmer regions of the globe, and so anthropogenic global warming (and climate change more broadly) now threatens to alter the geographic area for potential malaria transmission, as both the Plasmodium malaria parasite and Anopheles mosquito vector have highly temperature-dependent lifecycles, while the aquatic immature Anopheles habitats are also strongly dependent upon rainfall and local hydrodynamics. A wide variety of process-based (or mechanistic) mathematical models have thus been proposed for the complex, highly nonlinear weather-driven Anopheles lifecycle and malaria transmission dynamics, but have reached somewhat disparate conclusions as to optimum temperatures for transmission, and the possible effect of increasing temperatures upon (potential) malaria distribution, with some projecting a large increase in the area at risk for malaria, but others predicting primarily a shift in the disease’s geographic range. More generally, both global and local environmental changes drove the initial emergence of P. falciparum as a major human pathogen in tropical Africa some 10,000 years ago, and the disease has a long and deep history through the present. It is the goal of this paper to review major aspects of malaria biology, methods for formalizing these into mathematical forms, uncertainties and controversies in proper modeling methodology, and to provide a timeline of some major modeling efforts from the classical works of Sir Ronald Ross and George Macdonald through recent climate-focused modeling studies. Finally, we attempt to place such mathematical work within a broader historical context for the “million-murdering Death” of malaria.
AB - Malaria, one of the greatest historical killers of mankind, continues to claim around half a million lives annually, with almost all deaths occurring in children under the age of five living in tropical Africa. The range of this disease is limited by climate to the warmer regions of the globe, and so anthropogenic global warming (and climate change more broadly) now threatens to alter the geographic area for potential malaria transmission, as both the Plasmodium malaria parasite and Anopheles mosquito vector have highly temperature-dependent lifecycles, while the aquatic immature Anopheles habitats are also strongly dependent upon rainfall and local hydrodynamics. A wide variety of process-based (or mechanistic) mathematical models have thus been proposed for the complex, highly nonlinear weather-driven Anopheles lifecycle and malaria transmission dynamics, but have reached somewhat disparate conclusions as to optimum temperatures for transmission, and the possible effect of increasing temperatures upon (potential) malaria distribution, with some projecting a large increase in the area at risk for malaria, but others predicting primarily a shift in the disease’s geographic range. More generally, both global and local environmental changes drove the initial emergence of P. falciparum as a major human pathogen in tropical Africa some 10,000 years ago, and the disease has a long and deep history through the present. It is the goal of this paper to review major aspects of malaria biology, methods for formalizing these into mathematical forms, uncertainties and controversies in proper modeling methodology, and to provide a timeline of some major modeling efforts from the classical works of Sir Ronald Ross and George Macdonald through recent climate-focused modeling studies. Finally, we attempt to place such mathematical work within a broader historical context for the “million-murdering Death” of malaria.
KW - Climate change
KW - Malaria
KW - Ross–Macdonald
KW - Thermal-response
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U2 - 10.1007/s00285-018-1229-7
DO - 10.1007/s00285-018-1229-7
M3 - Review article
C2 - 29691632
AN - SCOPUS:85045951065
SN - 0303-6812
VL - 77
SP - 857
EP - 933
JO - Journal Of Mathematical Biology
JF - Journal Of Mathematical Biology
IS - 4
ER -