Kang Jeon-Young, Aldstadt Jared
Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14261, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2017 Jul 15;14(7):792. doi: 10.3390/ijerph14070792.
Dengue is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that is endemic in tropical and subtropical countries. Many individual-level simulation models have been developed to test hypotheses about dengue virus transmission. Often these efforts assume that human host and mosquito vector populations are randomly or uniformly distributed in the environment. Although, the movement of mosquitoes is affected by spatial configuration of buildings and mosquito populations are highly clustered in key buildings, little research has focused on the influence of the local built environment in dengue transmission models. We developed an agent-based model of dengue transmission in a village setting to test the importance of using realistic environments in individual-level models of dengue transmission. The results from one-way ANOVA analysis of simulations indicated that the differences between scenarios in terms of infection rates as well as serotype-specific dominance are statistically significant. Specifically, the infection rates in scenarios of a realistic environment are more variable than those of a synthetic spatial configuration. With respect to dengue serotype-specific cases, we found that a single dengue serotype is more often dominant in realistic environments than in synthetic environments. An agent-based approach allows a fine-scaled analysis of simulated dengue incidence patterns. The results provide a better understanding of the influence of spatial heterogeneity on dengue transmission at a local scale.
登革热是一种由蚊子传播的传染病，在热带和亚热带国家流行。已经开发了许多个体层面的模拟模型来检验关于登革热病毒传播的假设。通常这些研究假设人类宿主和蚊子媒介种群在环境中是随机或均匀分布的。然而，蚊子的活动受建筑物空间布局的影响，且蚊子种群在关键建筑物中高度聚集，很少有研究关注当地建筑环境在登革热传播模型中的影响。我们开发了一个基于主体的村庄环境中登革热传播模型，以检验在个体层面的登革热传播模型中使用现实环境的重要性。模拟的单因素方差分析结果表明，不同情景在感染率以及血清型特异性优势方面的差异具有统计学意义。具体而言，现实环境情景下的感染率比合成空间布局情景下的感染率更具变异性。关于登革热血清型特异性病例，我们发现单一登革热血清型在现实环境中比在合成环境中更常占主导地位。基于主体的方法允许对模拟的登革热发病模式进行精细分析。结果有助于更好地理解空间异质性在局部尺度上对登革热传播的影响。
