Why the growth of arboviral diseases necessitates a new generation of global risk maps and future projectionsSaw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
Global Health Research Group, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Gothenburg, Göteborgs Universitet, Gothenburg, Sweden; Population Health Research Section, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Dengue Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Bouvé College of Health Sciences and Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, MA, Boston, United States.
Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Dynamics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom; Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom.
Dengue Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom; School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Biology Department, Stanford University, CA, Stanford, United States.
Biodiversity Institute, The University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, Natural History Museum, KS, Lawrence, United States.
Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, CA, San Francisco, United States.
Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Geography, The Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida, FL, Gainesville, United States.
Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Umeå University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine. Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, University of Heidelberg, Universitat Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
Dengue Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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2025 (English)In: PloS Computational Biology, ISSN 1553-734X, E-ISSN 1553-7358, Vol. 21, no 4 APRIL, article id e1012771
Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Global risk maps are an important tool for assessing the global threat of mosquito and tick-transmitted arboviral diseases. Public health officials increasingly rely on risk maps to understand the drivers of transmission, forecast spread, identify gaps in surveillance, estimate disease burden, and target and evaluate the impact of interventions. Here, we describe how current approaches to mapping arboviral diseases have become unnecessarily siloed, ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of different data types and methods. This places limits on data and model output comparability, uncertainty estimation and generalisation that limit the answers they can provide to some of the most pressing questions in arbovirus control. We argue for a new generation of risk mapping models that jointly infer risk from multiple data types. We outline how this can be achieved conceptually and show how this new framework creates opportunities to better integrate epidemiological understanding and uncertainty quantification. We advocate for more co-development of risk maps among modellers and end-users to better enable risk maps to inform public health decisions. Prospective validation of risk maps for specific applications can inform further targeted data collection and subsequent model refinement in an iterative manner. If the expanding use of arbovirus risk maps for control is to continue, methods must develop and adapt to changing questions, interventions and data availability.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025. Vol. 21, no 4 APRIL, article id e1012771
National Category
Epidemiology Public Health, Global Health and Social Medicine
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-238240DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012771ISI: 001460001700007PubMedID: 40184562Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105001950828OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-238240DiVA, id: diva2:1955227
2025-04-292025-04-292025-04-29Bibliographically approved