The Effect of Climate Variables on Dengue Burden in Indonesia: A Case Study from Medan City

Abstract

Dengue is the world most serious arboviral diseases with regard to the number of people infected. In 2012, WHO informed that Indonesia is the second largest with dengue cases among the endemic countries. The most prevalent province in Indonesia of dengue cases outside java island was North Sumatra where Medan city was recorded as the highest cases within the province. Urbanization, demographic change and warming temperatures were related with the recent expansion of the primary vector of dengue; Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. In this paper, we examined the relation between climate factors and dengue cases in the study area. The association of them was performed through Generalized Additive Models (GAM), considering the number of dengue patients as response variable and climatic factor such as precipitation, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, average temperature and relative humidity as predictor variables. In addition, using this model vulnerability map was constructed. The result stated that climate variation influenced the number of dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) patients as 66.1% with precipitation variable was more important followed by maximum temperature. Furthermore, the highest risk of dengue was located in the main city of Medan.