Temperature and population density determine reservoir regions of seasonal persistence in highland malaria.

A better understanding of malaria persistence in highly seasonal environments such as highlands and desert fringes requires identifying the factors behind the spatial reservoir of the pathogen in the low season. In these 'unstable' malaria regions, such reservoirs play a critical role by allowing persistence during the low transmission season and therefore, between seasonal outbreaks. In the highlands of East Africa, the most populated epidemic regions in Africa, temperature is expected to be intimately connected to where in space the disease is able to persist because of pronounced altitudinal gradients. Here, we explore other environmental and demographic factors that may contribute to malaria's highland reservoir. We use an extensive spatio-temporal dataset of confirmed monthly Plasmodium falciparum cases from 1995 to 2005 that finely resolves space in an Ethiopian highland. With a Bayesian approach for parameter estimation and a generalized linear mixed model that includes a spatially structured random effect, we demonstrate that population density is important to disease persistence during the low transmission season. This population effect is not accounted for in typical models for the transmission dynamics of the disease, but is consistent in part with a more complex functional form of the force of infection proposed by theory for vector-borne infections, only during the low season as we discuss. As malaria risk usually decreases in more urban environments with increased human densities, the opposite counterintuitive finding identifies novel control targets during the low transmission season in African highlands.

Projections of global health outcomes from 2005 to 2060 using the International Futures integrated forecasting model.

OBJECTIVE: To develop an integrated health forecasting model as part of the International Futures (IFs) modelling system. METHODS: The IFs model begins with the historical relationships between economic and social development and cause-specific mortality used by the Global Burden of Disease project but builds forecasts from endogenous projections of these drivers by incorporating forward linkages from health outcomes back to inputs like population and economic growth. The hybrid IFs system adds alternative structural formulations for causes not well served by regression models and accounts for changes in proximate health risk factors. Forecasts are made to 2100 but findings are reported to 2060. FINDINGS: The base model projects that deaths from communicable diseases (CDs) will decline by 50%, whereas deaths from both non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and injuries will more than double. Considerable cross-national convergence in life expectancy will occur. Climate-induced fluctuations in agricultural yield will cause little excess childhood mortality from CDs, although other climate-health pathways were not explored. An optimistic scenario will produce 39 million fewer deaths in 2060 than a pessimistic one. Our forward linkage model suggests that an optimistic scenario would result in a 20% per cent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, despite one billion additional people. Southern Asia would experience the greatest relative mortality reduction and the largest resulting benefit in per capita GDP. CONCLUSION: Long-term, integrated health forecasting helps us understand the links between health and other markers of human progress and offers powerful insight into key points of leverage for future improvements.

Scenario processes for socio-environmental systems analysis of futures: A review of recent efforts and a salient research agenda for supporting decision making.

This paper reviews the latest research on scenarios including the processes and products for socio-environmental systems (SES) analysis, modeling and decision making. A group of scenario researchers and practitioners participated in a workshop to discuss consolidation of existing research on the development and use of scenario analysis in exploring and understanding the interplay between human and environmental systems. This paper presents an extended overview of the workshop discussions and follow-up review work. It is structured around the essential challenges that are crucial to progress support of decision making and learning with respect to our highly uncertain socio-environmental futures. It identifies a practical research agenda where challenges are grouped according to the process stage at which they are most significant: before, during, and after the creation of the scenarios as products. These challenges for SES include: enhancing the role of stakeholder and public engagement in the co-development of scenarios, linking scenarios across multiple geographical, sectoral and temporal scales, improving the links between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of scenario analysis, addressing uncertainties especially surprise, addressing scenario diversity and their consistency together, communicating scenarios including visualization methods, and linking scenarios to decision making.

Beyond Attributable Burden: Estimating the Avoidable Burden of Disease Associated with Household Air Pollution.

BACKGROUND: The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies have transformed global understanding of health risks by producing comprehensive estimates of attributable disease burden, or the current disease that would be eliminated if a risk factor did not exist. Yet many have noted the greater policy significance of avoidable burden, or the future disease that could actually be eliminated if a risk factor were eliminated today. Avoidable risk may be considerably lower than attributable risk if baseline levels of exposure or disease are declining, or if a risk factor carries lagged effects on disease. As global efforts to deliver clean cookstoves accelerate, a temporal estimation of avoidable risk due to household air pollution (HAP) becomes increasingly important, particularly in light of the rapid uptake of modern stoves and ongoing epidemiologic transitions in regions like South and Southeast Asia. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We estimate the avoidable burden associated with HAP using International Futures (IFs), an integrated forecasting system that has been used to model future global disease burdens and risk factors. Building on GBD and other estimates, we integrated a detailed HAP exposure estimation and exposure-response model into IFs. We then conducted a counterfactual experiment in which HAP exposure is reduced to theoretical minimum levels in 2015. We evaluated avoidable mortality and DALY reductions for the years 2015 to 2024 relative to a Base Case scenario in which only endogenous changes occurred. We present results by cause and region, looking at impacts on acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI) and four noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). We found that just 2.6% of global DALYs would be averted between 2015 and 2024, compared to 4.5% of global DALYs attributed to HAP in the 2010 GBD study, due in large part to the endogenous tendency towards declining traditional stove usage in the IFs base case forecast. The extent of diminished impact was comparable for ALRI and affected NCDs, though for different reasons. ALRI impacts diminish due to the declining burden of ALRI in the base case forecast, particularly apparent in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Although NCD burdens are rising in regions affected by HAP, the avoidable risk of NCD nonetheless diminishes due to lagged effects. Because the stove transition and the decline of ALRI are proceeding more slowly in Sub-Saharan Africa, avoidable impacts would also be more persistent (3.9% of total DALY due to HAP) compared to South Asia (3.6%) or Southeast Asia (2.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Our results illustrate how a temporal dynamic calculation of avoidable risk may yield different estimates, compared to a static attributable risk estimate, of the global and regional burden of disease. Our results suggest a window of rising and falling opportunity for HAP interventions that may have already closed in Southeast Asia and may be closing quickly in South Asia, but may remain open longer in Sub-Saharan Africa. A proper accounting of global health priorities should apply an avoidable risk framework that considers the role of ongoing social, economic and health transitions in constantly altering the disease and risk factor landscape.