©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• Predicting and preventing climate-driven epidemics (0)
• Trying to Leave Meningitis in the Dust (0)

A massive scale-up in the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets and other control programs are helping to protect more than half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa against malaria, according to the World Health Organization. In its latest World Malaria Report, the organization cited these efforts as contributing to significant but fragile decreases in malaria cases and deaths in the region.

Worldwide, the WHO estimates deaths from malaria in 2009 were 781,000, about 200,000 fewer than they were in 2000. The most significant gains were made in Africa, where the disease extracts the heaviest burden on society. There, eleven countries saw cases and deaths drop by at least half between 2008 and 2010. Additionally, in 32 countries outside of Africa where malaria is considered to be endemic–occurring year-round–the number of confirmed cases also dropped by more than half. However, some countries, such as Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Zambia showed a worrying reversal to this trend in malaria cases in 2009, highlighting the need for constant vigilance and careful assessment of the roles that socioeconomic and environmental factors, including climate, play in driving these changes.

“The news coming out of the WHO report is overall very encouraging, but we still need to know if any of the changes in malaria trends are really a result of the interventions and not due to other factors, such as a drought,” says Madeleine Thomson, a senior research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which is also a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Climate Sensitive Diseases. “Knowing this would improve the quality of our impact assessment,” she says.

Climate is an especially important factor in malaria control programs. Seasonal changes in rainfall and temperature may hinder, or aid, the effectiveness of intervention programs. Then there’s longer term climate change, which could work to alter the distribution of malaria in ways that are not yet fully understood.

At the behest of the WHO, Thomson, along with colleagues Pietro Ceccato and Michael Bell, analyzed the relationship between climate and disease trends in a number of African countries for the malaria report. For that rapid fire analysis, the group accessed globally available climate data derived from satellite information and ground-based rainfall and temperature measurements and correlated these results with malaria data at the regional level. They found that for the most part, it is unlikely climate played a major role in the observed changes in malaria trends. However, using the global data sets limited the strength of conclusions that could be drawn at the regional level.

“These data sets tend to be incomplete in regions where ground measurements are sparse and have coarse resolution,” says Pietro Ceccato. “To really get a deep understanding of the relationship between climate and malaria trends, scientists need access to higher resolution, local data sources, which means working closely with national institutions.”

But often the data are not easily available due to logistic, resource and policy constraints.

The IRI has made progress toward this end in Ethiopia, where it collaborates with the Ministry of Health and the National Meteorological Agency to improve decision making on public-health and disease-control issues. In November, the three organizations led a malaria training workshop organized by the Climate and Health Working Group of Ethiopia and funded by Google.org. The public-health and climate professionals who attended the workshop explored how climate conditions affect malaria distribution. They used local data sets provided by the health ministry and meteorological agency to conduct their analyses. They learned how climate information such as seasonal forecasts and environmental monitoring could help improve predictions of year-to-year variations of epidemics and could be used to more accurately evaluate the role of interventions.

“Taking climate out of the equation is important for malaria impact evaluation,” Thomson says. “Doing this using the national data sets is not only likely to get the best results, but also helps control programs understand the extent to which their outcomes are climate-sensitive. Climate information is another tool in the malaria control toolbox.”

Relevant Links

• IRI Technical Report 06-01: A Gap Analysis for the Implementation of the Global Climate Observing System Programme in Africa
• Climate Information for Public Health Action

Malaria control workers distributing free insecticidal bed nets to families with children under five in Benin. WHO

©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• Predicting and preventing climate-driven epidemics (0)
• IRI data on NASA’s mapping tool (0)

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Internet search company, has awarded the IRI $900,000 to work with its partners to improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate information in East Africa, and to build stronger connections between weather, climate and health specialists there so they can better predict and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The award is part of Google.org’s Predict and Prevent program, which funds projects and technologies that help map “hot spots” of global emerging infectious diseases and develop improved early-warning systems that predict potential disease outbreaks.

Climate plays a critical role in determining the distribution of many of Africa’s epidemic diseases, such as malaria and meningitis. Their transmission is dependent on prevailing environmental conditions such as rainfall and temperature. Year-to-year variations in the amount of rainfall and temperature can therefore change the pattern and timing of epidemics. This makes it difficult for poor countries to plan their public health strategies.

But the link between climate and some diseases means that seasonal forecasts, satellite measurements and other data can be useful in making decisions about how much resources to allocate for an upcoming epidemic season, and when and where to allocate them.

Read more about the Google.org grant.

Be sure to dowload a cool new Google Earth layer that shows the locations of each grant project.

©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• Trying to Leave Meningitis in the Dust (0)
• Meningitis: the Climate connection (0)

April 25 marks the first World Malaria Day, created by the World Health Organization to raise global awareness of this devastating but preventable infectious disease. As a PAHO-WHO Collaborating Centre, the IRI has long provided countries the technical support needed to develop early warning systems for malaria and other climate sensitive diseases.

IRI’s diverse set of experts demonstrate ways in which climate information, such as historic variability, real-time monitoring and seasonal forecasting, improves decision making in health, agriculture and other climate-sensitive sectors.

Read all about the IRI’s malaria work here.

©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• Malaria and dengue fever in Colombia (0)
• IRI data on NASA’s mapping tool (0)

Users of IRI’s Malaria Map Room and desert locust monitoring tools for Africa can now take advantage of SERVIR, NASA’s high-tech satellite visualization system, thanks to a new plugin developed by scientists at the Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technology [IAGT] and IRI.

As with other mapping browsers such as Google Earth, SERVIR allows users to zoom from satellite altitude to any place on Earth, and even tilt their viewing angle so that they can “fly” across a 3-D terrain. What’s more, the software taps into dozens of high-resolution satellite-image sources such as MODIS and Landsat. Users can add layers that show temperature, rainfall, cloud cover over the entire globe. They can even overlay animated weather events, such as hurricanes.

Read the more about this on the IRI’s web site.

And check out IRI’s media page.

©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• What is climate risk management? (0)
• Predicting and preventing climate-driven epidemics (0)

Each year in Colombia, more than 100,000 people get sick from malaria and approximately 42,000 come down with dengue fever. Now, the national government has enlisted IRI’s help in using climate risk management in an ongoing project to improve its early-warning system for the two diseases. The work is overseen by the World Bank and funded by Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and Colombia.”What makes this work fresh and exciting is its approach,” says Walter Baethgen, director of IRI’s Latin America and Caribbean Program. “We have here a project on climate-change adaptation, funded by large and respected global institution, that is looking at ways to reduce a society’s current vulnerabilities to climate as a means of improving its future ability to adapt. This isn’t about projections fifty or hundred years from now, which mean little to people already having to deal with climate risks today.”Colombia spends $15 million annually to try to control malaria and dengue, according to Gilma Mantilla, who, until recently, ran the infectious-disease surveillance program at the Instituto Nacional de Salud (INS). Mantilla says that climate change may have profound impacts on the transmission dynamics of dengue and malaria in the country. [image: James Gathany/CDC]
Read the rest of the story here

©2012 autogeno.us. All Rights Reserved.

• IRI’s Efforts to Combat Malaria (0)
• IRI data on NASA’s mapping tool (0)