Relationships between climate and year-to-year variability in meningitis outbreaks: A case study in Burkina Faso and Niger

Abstract

Background: Every year, West Africa is afflicted with Meningococcal Meningitis (MCM) disease outbreaks. Although the seasonal and spatial patterns of disease cases have been shown to be linked to climate, the mechanisms responsible for these patterns are still not well identified.

Seasonality of meningitis in Africa and climate forcing: aerosols stand out

“…First quantitative studies were recently conducted, especially in the frame of the AMMA programme [24][25][26][27], leading to new hypotheses on the relationships between climate, dust and epidemic cycles. In this study, we strengthen these first results and go further into details by considering data at the weekly district level.…”

“…Since then, several studies have investigated the relationship between climate and meningitis using different approaches: qualitative [1,2,5,6,22,23] and recently quantitative [24][25][26][27][28]. The main conclusions of these studies were that (i) the intensity of the epidemics is related to the Harmattan wind [23,24,27,28] and its strength [29]; (ii) the onset of the epidemics is in phase with the winter maximum as defined by Sultan et al [24] and with the arrival of the dust in the low layers of the atmosphere [25,26]; and (iii) the end of the epidemic season coincides with the arrival of the African monsoon [25,26]. The main hypothesis to explain climate impact on meningitis epidemics is an increase in the invasion rate (i.e.…”

Seasonal Pattern of Pneumonia Mortality among Under-Five Children in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements

“…For instance, the incidence of meningococcal meningitis has been associated with the dry season in the Sahel region. 11,12 Additionally, several studies have investigated the effect of weather patterns-specifically cold weather-on the incidence of upper respiratory tract and oral tract infections, mostly in temperate countries. 13,14 Several patho-physiologic mechanisms have been suggested to explain how exposure to a sudden drop in temperature results in an acute respiratory infection.…”

A Bayesian network approach to the study of historical epidemiological databases: modelling meningitis outbreaks in the Niger

“…2,25 In the present study, surveillance data and a modelling method based on Bayesian networks were used to explore how meningitis incidence in a district of the Niger was influenced by, or influenced, the incidence in any other district. The aim was to develop a method for the optimization of epidemic alerts and the spatial and temporal targeting of immunizations and other interventions for the management of meningitis in the Niger, with the ultimate goal of preventing meningitis epidemics in the country.…”

“…2,[24][25][26] While the seasonal and spatial patterns of the disease appear to be linked to climate, the mechanisms Objective To develop a tool for evaluating the risk that an outbreak of meningitis will occur in a particular district of the Niger after outbreaks have been reported in other, specified districts of the country. Methods A Bayesian network was represented by a graph composed of 38 nodes (one for each district in the Niger) connected by arrows.…”