About
Mosquito-borne diseases are those spread by the bite of an infected mosquito. Aedes spp. can transmit dengue virus (DENV), chikungunya virus (CHIKV), zika virus and yellow fever virus. In Thailand, dengue and chikungunya pose a significant public health concern, particularly among adolescents. Dengue fever is a disease that has no specific antiviral treatment but is managed supportively. Currently, the care and treatment of dengue fever patients has become much more effective. However, it is still observed that the mortality rate is approximately 0.1 to 0.5 percent, resulting in significant losses.
Arboviral diseases are seen to be strongly conditioned by climate, essentially through the modulation of the vector population and the vectorial capacity. Predictive climate skill exists for these diseases and regions and it can be incorporated into actionable alert systems for enhanced seasonal incidences. However, despite the scarcity of actionable early-warning systems available for forecasting infectious diseases driven by climate, a recent report identified vector borne diseases as being the target of most of those tools (Wellcome Trust, 2022). A closer inspection, though, indicates that prediction models that can be used on an operational basis are lacking and their skill for out-of-fit prediction is limited. To this end, we intend to adapt our formerly developed platform for arboviral risk prediction in Catalonia, named ARBOCAT (www.arbocat.org, Lopez et al. 2023) to use for ARBOBANG. For Bangkok, we will use an urban climate model, already used by the PI to resolve cities at 100-m spatial resolution to generate a climate map for the urban metropolitan area at this fine spatial scale (García-Díez et al. 2016). We will then use the fine-scale dengue foci results obtained by the partners to study the relationships between climate, urban demography, human mobility and socioeconomic indicators and to tune a suite of variable dengue model configurations (statistical and dynamical)(Lefebvre et al. 2022). Concurrently, a number of citizen science activities will be set to help in the calibration/validation phases that seek both to raise local awareness and to manage people’s engagement. In these initiatives, environmental conditions will be determined together with vector population densities to inform on the roles and functional relationships of key model parameter values.
