The influence of climate variables on dengue in Singapore
- 9 May 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Informa UK Limited in International Journal of Environmental Health Research
- Vol. 21 (6), 415-426
- https://doi.org/10.1080/09603123.2011.572279
Abstract
In this work we correlated dengue cases with climatic variables for the city of Singapore. This was done through a Poisson Regression Model (PRM) that considers dengue cases as the dependent variable and the climatic variables (rainfall, maximum and minimum temperature and relative humidity) as independent variables. We also used Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to choose the variables that influence in the increase of the number of dengue cases in Singapore, where PC1 (Principal component 1) is represented by temperature and rainfall and PC2 (Principal component 2) is represented by relative humidity. We calculated the probability of occurrence of new cases of dengue and the relative risk of occurrence of dengue cases influenced by climatic variable. The months from July to September showed the highest probabilities of the occurrence of new cases of the disease throughout the year. This was based on an analysis of time series of maximum and minimum temperature. An interesting result was that for every 2–10°C of variation of the maximum temperature, there was an average increase of 22.2–184.6% in the number of dengue cases. For the minimum temperature, we observed that for the same variation, there was an average increase of 26.1–230.3% in the number of the dengue cases from April to August. The precipitation and the relative humidity, after analysis of correlation, were discarded in the use of Poisson Regression Model because they did not present good correlation with the dengue cases. Additionally, the relative risk of the occurrence of the cases of the disease under the influence of the variation of temperature was from 1.2–2.8 for maximum temperature and increased from 1.3–3.3 for minimum temperature. Therefore, the variable temperature (maximum and minimum) was the best predictor for the increased number of dengue cases in Singapore.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Managing the health effects of climate changeThe Lancet, 2009
- Clima e epidemias de dengue no Estado do Rio de JaneiroRevista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical, 2009
- Local and Global Effects of Climate on Dengue Transmission in Puerto RicoPLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 2009
- Dengue in Southeast Asia: epidemiological characteristics and strategic challenges in disease preventionCadernos de Saude Publica, 2009
- Human Health Risk Assessment due to Global Warming – A Case Study of the Gulf CountriesInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2008
- Dengue Virus–Mosquito InteractionsAnnual Review of Entomology, 2008
- Modelling the control strategies against dengue in SingaporeEpidemiology and Infection, 2007
- Vigilância entomológica e controle de vetores do dengueRevista Brasileira de Epidemiologia, 2002
- Potential effect of population and climate changes on global distribution of dengue fever: an empirical modelThe Lancet, 2002
- Potential Changes in the Distribution of Dengue Transmission under Climate WarmingThe American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 1997