The Impact of Environmental Change on Spatial and Temporal Variations of Dengue Outbreaks-- Part Ii

Dengue fever has become the most important vector-borne disease in Taiwan due to climate change in parallel with frequent international travel activities. The outbreaks of dengue fever could be triggered by multiple environmental factors, including climate, land cover/use, population density and migration. Our team has developed climate-based models to forecast dengue outbreaks in the previous two years, we will shift the focus from climate to the impacts of land cover/use on dengue transmission and mosquito ecology in this study. Habitats preference of mosquito and human-vector contact probability could be linked to specific land cover/use types. The study will aim on three research topics: (1) Use trend surface analysis to evaluate diffusion time and velocity of dengue cases in space. (2) Identify dengue related land cover/use types and analyze their impacts on the spatial distributions of dengue transmission. (3) Investigate the environmental factors related to mosquito abundances. The results will help public health authority to set up priority of control measurement in high risk regions. We also can provide information for establishing vector surveillance system in the future. A dengue early warning and prevention platform could be shaped if we can integrate the achievement of this analysis with the climate-based prediction model.