Modeling Malaria Risk for Three Provinces in Thailand

Keywords: Infectious disease, risk assessment, spatial analysis, health, mobility
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56

Abstract

Malaria is a severe and sometimes fatal disease that is primarily found in Africa and South-East Asia. It is caused by the Plasmodium parasite, which is transmitted to humans through infected mosquitoes. Estimating malaria risk across a region can provide local health officials with information useful to mitigate possible transmission of malaria as well as risk of exposure for local populations. This study investigates the spatial pattern of Plasmodium vivax (P.v.) and Plasmodium falciparum (P.f.) in three provinces of Thailand from January 2019- April 2020. In addition to data on malaria infections collected by the Ministry of Public Health of Thailand, as well as survey data collected by a team of researchers with the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS), we use a maximum entropy modeling tool (MaxEnt) to estimate the distribution of P.v. and P.f. malaria and generate an estimate of potential malaria risk for these regions in Thailand.

The survey data included demographics such as age, gender, occupation, and malaria infection. Additional environmental data was also collected including minimum, maximum, and average temperature, precipitation, land cover, elevation and more. MaxEnt was applied to generate a probability surface or ecological niche that captures the spatial variability of malaria risk within the research area. We additionally consider the level of impact that occupation, travel mobility, and mode of travel has on risk of exposure to malaria in the area through an analysis of these travel variables and the MaxEnt results.