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  4. Cholera in the Lake Kivu region (DRC): Integrating remote sensing and spatially explicit epidemiological modeling
 
research article

Cholera in the Lake Kivu region (DRC): Integrating remote sensing and spatially explicit epidemiological modeling

Finger, Flavio  
•
Knox, Allyn  
•
Bertuzzo, Enrico  
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2014
Water Resources Research

Mathematical models of cholera dynamics can not only help in identifying environmental drivers and processes that influence disease transmission, but may also represent valuable tools for the prediction of the epidemiological patterns in time and space as well as for the allocation of health care resources. Cholera outbreaks have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the 1970s. They have been ravaging the shore of Lake Kivu in the east of the country repeatedly during the last decades. Here we employ a spatially explicit, inhomogeneous Markov chain model to describe cholera incidence in eight health zones on the shore of the lake. Remotely sensed datasets of chlorophyll concentration in the lake, precipitation and indices of global climate anomalies are used as environmental drivers in addition to baseline seasonality. The effect of human mobility is also modelled mechanistically. We test several models on a multi-year dataset of reported cholera cases. The best fourteen models, accounting for different environmental drivers, and selected using the Akaike information criterion, are formally compared via proper cross-validation. Among these, the one accounting for seasonality, El Niñno Southern Oscillation, precipitation and human mobility outperforms the others in cross-validation. Some drivers (such as human mobility and rainfall) are retained only by a few models, possibly indicating that the mechanisms through which they influence cholera dynamics in the area will have to be investigated further.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1002/2014WR015521
Web of Science ID

WOS:000342632000015

Author(s)
Finger, Flavio  
Knox, Allyn  
Bertuzzo, Enrico  
Mari, Lorenzo  
Bompangue, Didier
Gatto, Marino
Rodriguez-Iturbe, Ignacio
Rinaldo, Andrea  
Date Issued

2014

Publisher

American Geophysical Union

Published in
Water Resources Research
Volume

50

Issue

7

Start page

5624

End page

5637

Subjects

Cholera

•

Markov chain

•

DRC

•

Lake Kivu

•

ENSO

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ECHO  
Available on Infoscience
June 24, 2014
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/104710
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