Projecting The Impacts Of Climate Change On Malaria Transmission In Africa

There are more than 200 million malaria cases every year. As climate change affects the delicate balance of human and mosquito populations in places such as Africa, that number could be affected-potentially for the worse. In regions of Africa, where the transmission of malaria is limited due to the lack of the water pools that may act as breeding sites for mosquitoes, any increase in rainfall due to climate change may increase the risk of malaria transmission, especially if the average temperature during the transmission season falls in the ideal range between 26- and 29-degrees C. In the course of the last two decades, the Eltahir Research Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed and tested one of the most sophisticated numerical models of malaria transmission: Hydrology, Entomology, and Malaria Transmission Simulator (HYDREMATS). This a mechanistic agent-based, spatially-explicit model that has three compartments covering hydrology, entomology, and immunology. This book details the use of HYDREMATS to answer the question about the impact of climate change on malaria.