Geographic distribution and ecological niche of plague in sub-Saharan Africa
Issue Date
2008-10-23Author
Neerinckx, Simon B.
Peterson, A. Townsend
Gulinck, Hubert
Deckers, Jozef
Leirs, Herwig
Publisher
BioMed Central
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Background: Plague is a rapidly progressing, serious illness in humans that is likely to be fatal if
not treated. It remains a public health threat, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In spite of plague's
highly focal nature, a thorough ecological understanding of the general distribution pattern of
plague across sub-Saharan Africa has not been established to date. In this study, we used human
plague data from sub-Saharan Africa for 1970–2007 in an ecological niche modeling framework to
explore the potential geographic distribution of plague and its ecological requirements across
Africa.
Results: We predict a broad potential distributional area of plague occurrences across sub-
Saharan Africa. General tests of model's transferability suggest that our model can anticipate the
potential distribution of plague occurrences in Madagascar and northern Africa. However,
generality and predictive ability tests using regional subsets of occurrence points demonstrate the
models to be unable to predict independent occurrence points outside the training region
accurately. Visualizations show plague to occur in diverse landscapes under wide ranges of
environmental conditions.
Conclusion: We conclude that the typical focality of plague, observed in sub-Saharan Africa, is not
related to fragmented and insular environmental conditions manifested at a coarse continental
scale. However, our approach provides a foundation for testing hypotheses concerning focal
distribution areas of plague and their links with historical and environmental factors.
Description
doi:10.1186/1476-072X-7-54
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Citation
Neerinckx, S. B., A. T. Peterson, H. Gulinck, J. Deckers, and H. Leirs. 2008. Geographic distribution and ecological niche of plague in sub-Saharan Africa. International Journal of Health Geographics 7:54 online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1476-072X-7-54
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