Malaria Ecology, Disease Burden and Global Climate Change

Abstract:

Malaria has afflicted human society for over 2 million years, and remains one of the great killer diseases today. The disease is the fourth leading cause of death for children under five in low income countries (after neonatal disorders, diarrhea, and pneumonia) and is responsible for at least one in every five child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. It kills up to 3 million people a year, though in recent years scale up of anti-malaria efforts in Africa may have brought deaths to below 1 million. Malaria is highly conditioned by ecology, because of which climate change is likely to change the local dynamics of the disease through changes in ambient temperature and precipitation. To assess the potential implications of climate change for the malaria burden, this paper employs a Malaria Ecology Index from the epidemiology literature, relates it to malaria incidence and mortality using global country-level data , and then draws implications for 2100 by extrapolating the index using several general circulation model (GCM) predictions of temperature and precipitation. The results highlight the climate change driven increase in the basic reproduction number of the disease and the resulting complications for further gains in elimination. For illustrative purposes, I report the change in malaria incidence and mortality if climate change were to happen immediately under current technology and public health efforts.