University of Groningen, CEES, Haren, The Netherlands.
Proc Biol Sci. 2011 Jun 7;278(1712):1661-9. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2020. Epub 2010 Nov 10.
Climate change impacts on malaria are typically assessed with scenarios for the long-term future. Here we focus instead on the recent past (1970-2003) to address whether warmer temperatures have already increased the incidence of malaria in a highland region of East Africa. Our analyses rely on a new coupled mosquito-human model of malaria, which we use to compare projected disease levels with and without the observed temperature trend. Predicted malaria cases exhibit a highly nonlinear response to warming, with a significant increase from the 1970s to the 1990s, although typical epidemic sizes are below those observed. These findings suggest that climate change has already played an important role in the exacerbation of malaria in this region. As the observed changes in malaria are even larger than those predicted by our model, other factors previously suggested to explain all of the increase in malaria may be enhancing the impact of climate change.
气候变化对疟疾的影响通常通过长期未来的情景来评估。在这里，我们将重点关注近期（1970-2003 年），以确定高温是否已经在东非的一个高地地区增加了疟疾的发病率。我们的分析依赖于一种新的蚊-人耦合疟疾模型，我们用它来比较有和没有观测到的温度趋势的预测疾病水平。预测的疟疾病例对变暖表现出高度非线性的反应，从 20 世纪 70 年代到 90 年代有显著增加，尽管典型的流行规模低于实际观察到的规模。这些发现表明，气候变化已经在该地区疟疾的恶化中发挥了重要作用。由于观察到的疟疾变化甚至大于我们模型预测的变化，以前被认为可以解释所有疟疾增加的其他因素可能正在增强气候变化的影响。
