USGS ScienceSearch

USGS · 70212845

Spatiotemporal modeling of dengue fever risk in Puerto Rico

Abstract

Dengue Fever (DF) is a mosquito vector transmitted flavivirus and a reemerging global public health threat. Although several studies have addressed the relation between climatic and environmental factors and the epidemiology of DF, or looked at purely spatial or time series analysis, this article presents a joint spatio-temporal epidemiological analysis. Our approach accounts for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation in DF incidence and the effect of temperatures and precipitation by using a hierarchical Bayesian approach. We fitted several space-time areal models to predict relative risk at the municipality level and for each month from 1990 to 2014. Model selection was performed according to several criteria: the preferred models detected significant effects for temperature at time lags of up to four months and for precipitation up to three months. A boundary detection analysis is incorporated in the modeling approach, and it was successful in detecting municipalities with historically anomalous risk.

Explore related subjects

90° N90° S · 180° W ← longitude → 180° E
Source-reported bounding extent: 17.926875° to 18.515757° latitude; -67.940799° to -65.221568° longitude. This indicates report coverage, not an exact sampling location. View area on OpenStreetMap.

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Gavino Puggioni, Jannelle Couret, Emily Serman, Ali S Akanda, Howard S. Ginsberg. 2020. Spatiotemporal modeling of dengue fever risk in Puerto Rico. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sste.2020.100375

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related USGS reports

Predicting the odds of chronic wasting disease with Habitat Risk software

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that was first detected in captive cervids in Colorado, United States (US) in 1967, but has since spread into free-ranging white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) across the US and Canada as well as to Scandinavia and South Korea. In some areas, the disease is considered endemic in wild deer populations, and governmental wildlife agencies have employed epidemiological models to understand long-term environmental risk. However, continued rapid spread of CWD into new regions of the continent has underscored the need for extension of these models into broader tools applicable for wide use by wildlife agencies. Additionally, efforts to semi-automate models will facilitate access of technical scientific methods to broader users. We introduce software (Habitat Risk) designed to link a previously published epidemiological model with spatially referenced environmental and disease testing data to enable agency personnel to make up-to-date, localized, data-driven predictions regarding the odds of CWD detection in surrounding areas after an outbreak is discovered. Habitat Risk requires pre-processing publicly available environmental datasets and standardization of disease testing (surveillance) data, after which an autonomous computational workflow terminates in a user interface that displays an interactive map of disease risk. We demonstrated the use of the Habitat Risk software with surveillance data of white-tailed deer from Tennessee, USA.

Tennessee