Center of Conservation Medicine & Ecological Safety, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, P. R. China.
Key Laboratory of Wildlife Diseases and Biosecurity Management, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, P. R. China.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 20;17(9):e0274325. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274325. eCollection 2022.
The reemergence of monkeypoxvirus (MPXV) in 2017 after about 39 years of no reported cases in Nigeria, and the recent incidence in countries such as the United States of America, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Israel which have been reportedly linked with travelers from Africa, have heightened concern that MPXV may have emerged to occupy the vacant ecological and immunological niche created by the extinct smallpox virus. This study was carried out to identify environmental conditions and areas that are environmentally suitable (risky areas) for MPXV in southern Nigeria. One hundred and sixteen (116) spatially unique MPXV occurrence data from 2017-2021 and corresponding environmental variables were spatially modeled by a maximum entropy algorithm to evaluate the contribution of the variables to the distribution of the viral disease. A variance inflation analysis was adopted to limit the number of environmental variables and minimize multicollinearity. The five variables that contributed to the suitability model for MPXV disease are precipitation of driest quarter (47%), elevation (26%), human population density (17%), minimum temperature in December (7%), and maximum temperature in March (3%). For validation, our model had a high AUC value of 0.92 and standard deviation of 0.009 indicating that it had excellent ability to predict the suitable areas for monkeypox disease. Categorized risk classes across southern states was also identified. A total of eight states were predicted to be at high risk of monkeypox outbreak occurrence. These findings can guide policymakers in resources allocation and distribution to effectively implement targeted control measures for MPXV outbreaks in southern Nigeria.
猴痘病毒(MPXV)在尼日利亚约 39 年未报告病例后于 2017 年再次出现,最近在美国、英国、新加坡和以色列等国也有病例报告,这些国家的病例据称与来自非洲的旅行者有关,这引起了人们的高度关注,即 MPXV 可能已经出现,以填补已灭绝的天花病毒所留下的生态和免疫空白。本研究旨在确定尼日利亚南部环境条件和适合 MPXV 的环境区域(高风险区域)。2017 年至 2021 年期间,从 116 个具有空间独特性的猴痘病毒发生数据和相应的环境变量中,采用最大熵算法对数据进行了空间建模,以评估变量对病毒病分布的贡献。采用方差膨胀分析来限制环境变量的数量并最小化多重共线性。对适合猴痘病毒疾病的模型有贡献的五个变量是:最干燥季度的降水量(47%)、海拔(26%)、人口密度(17%)、12 月最低温度(7%)和 3 月最高温度(3%)。为了验证,我们的模型 AUC 值很高,为 0.92,标准偏差为 0.009,这表明它具有出色的预测猴痘疾病适宜区域的能力。还确定了南部各州的风险分类。共有 8 个州被预测为猴痘爆发发生的高风险州。这些发现可以为决策者提供指导,以便在尼日利亚南部分配和分配资源,有效实施针对 MPXV 爆发的目标控制措施。