Ecological niche modelling for predicting the risk of cutaneous leishmaniasis in the Neotropical moist forest biome

A major challenge of eco-epidemiology is to determine which factors promote the transmission of infectious diseases and to establish risk maps that can be used by public health authorities. The geographic predictions resulting from ecological niche modelling have been widely used for modelling the future dispersion of vectors based on the occurrence records and the potential prevalence of the disease. The establishment of risk maps for disease systems with complex cycles such as cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) can be very challenging due to the many inference networks between large sets of host and vector species, with considerable heterogeneity in disease patterns in space and time. One novelty in the present study is the use of human CL cases to predict the risk of leishmaniasis occurrence in response to anthropogenic, climatic and environmental factors at two different scales, in the Neotropical moist forest biome (Amazonian basin and surrounding forest ecosystems) and in the surrounding region of French Guiana. With a consistent data set never used before and a conceptual and methodological framework for interpreting data cases, we obtained risk maps with high statistical support. The predominantly identified human CL risk areas are those where the human impact on the environment is significant, associated with less contributory climatic and ecological factors. For both models this study highlights the importance of considering the anthropogenic drivers for disease risk assessment in human, although CL is mainly linked to the sylvatic and peri-urban cycle in Meso and South America. © 2019 Chavy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

• Fecha de publicación: 2019
• Institución: Universidad del Rosario
• Repositorio: Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/22824
• Acceso en línea: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0007629; https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/22824
• Palabra clave: Altitude; Anthropology; Biomass; Biome; Climate; Disease transmission; Ecological niche; Ecological phenomena and functions; Environmental temperature; Geographic distribution; Human; Human footprint; Incidence; Neotropics; Population density; Poverty; Prediction; Seasonal variation; Skin leishmaniasis; Species richness; Tropical rain forest; Ecology; Ecosystem; Forest; French guiana; Prevalence; Season; Skin leishmaniasis; South america; Ecology; Ecosystem; Forests; French guiana; Humans; Prevalence; Seasons; South america; cutaneous; Leishmaniasis
• License: Abierto (Texto Completo)