ICREA and CLIMA (Climate and Health) Program, ISGlobal, Barcelona, Spain.
Department of Epidemiology, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2021 Mar 10;12(1):1555. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-21815-y.
A counterargument to the importance of climate change for malaria transmission has been that regions where an effect of warmer temperatures is expected, have experienced a marked decrease in seasonal epidemic size since the turn of the new century. This decline has been observed in the densely populated highlands of East Africa at the center of the earlier debate on causes of the pronounced increase in epidemic size from the 1970s to the 1990s. The turnaround of the incidence trend around 2000 is documented here with an extensive temporal record for malaria cases for both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax in an Ethiopian highland. With statistical analyses and a process-based transmission model, we show that this decline was driven by the transient slowdown in global warming and associated changes in climate variability, especially ENSO. Decadal changes in temperature and concurrent climate variability facilitated rather than opposed the effect of interventions.
气候变化对疟疾传播重要性的一个反论是，在预计变暖温度有影响的地区，自新世纪以来，季节性流行规模已经显著减少。在东非人口密集的高地，人们对此进行了观察，这里曾是疟疾流行规模从 20 世纪 70 年代到 90 年代明显增加的原因的早期争论的中心。本文记录了在埃塞俄比亚高地疟疾病例的广泛时间记录中，发病率趋势在 2000 年左右的转变。通过统计分析和基于过程的传播模型，我们表明这种下降是由全球变暖的暂时放缓以及气候变异性的相关变化（尤其是厄尔尼诺-南方涛动）驱动的。温度和同期气候变率的年代际变化促进了干预措施的效果，而不是阻碍了其效果。
