From the University of Liverpool it seems they are confusing seasonal scale weather with climate.
Climate model to predict malaria outbreaks in India
Scientists from the University of Liverpool are working with computer modelling specialists in India to predict areas of the country that are at most risk of malaria outbreaks, following changes in monsoon rainfall.
The number of heavy rainfall events in India has increased over the past 50 years, but research has tended to focus on the impact this has on agriculture rather than the vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and Japanese Encephalitis.
The University’s School of Environmental Sciences is working with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS), Bangalore, to develop technology that will help decision makers and planners target areas that are prone to large scale climate variability and malaria epidemics.
The number of malaria cases in India has dropped from two million a year to 1.5 million in recent years, but the percentage of the more dangerous form of the disease, P. falciparum infection, has increased in some areas. The model could help inform early intervention methods to prevent the spread of malaria at key points in the seasonal monsoon cycle, reducing the economic and health impacts of the disease.
Dr Andy Morse, from the University’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “We already know that an anomalous season of heavy rainfall, when heat and humidity are high, allows insects such as mosquitoes to thrive and spread infection to humans. In order to prepare health services and prevent epidemics we must have a way of predicting when these events are likely to occur in areas that are not accustomed to annual outbreaks of malaria.
“Liverpool has developed human and animal disease models that can be integrated into seasonal forecasting systems to give a picture of what the climate impacts on disease risk will be like in four to six months time.”
Dr Prashant Goswami, from C-MMACS, India, said: “We are rapidly developing our computer modelling capabilities using technology that can address the impacts of climate variability on agriculture and water systems. This knowledge, together with the Liverpool models of vector-borne diseases, will help us develop systems to predict when changes in the monsoonal rain may occur and which areas are most likely to see an increase in malaria.
“Health authorities in India are already very successful at controlling malaria cases, but this new research should support decision makers in keeping ahead of the more serious occurrences of the disease, which is starting to increase across the country alongside the changing climate conditions.”
The work, funded by the UK India Education Research Initiative (UKIERI), forms part of the University’s Global Health research theme, which brings together experts in infectious disease, reproductive health, and mental health from across the institution.
I have had malaria myself four times. Twice I had the non-recurring type, the one that doesn’t come back. Then I had the recurrent kind, the one that does come back. Finally, about a year after I moved to Fiji and left the malaria mosquitoes behind, I had a a bout of that recurrent malaria. Then I took the medicine that kills the recurring kind, and I haven’t had it since.
In addition, my wife is a Family Nurse Practitioner. In the Solomons she worked with the outlying clinics in the capital. Then she worked for a couple years as the Peace Corps Medical Officer, charged with keeping the Peace Corps Volunteers healthy. Then for three years, she was the only medical person on a very remote island where I ran a shipyard with a couple dozen employees, plus wives and kids. So she is extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and I learned all about malaria from her and from textbooks.
Then in Fiji, she and I ran a three-country health program, which included Vanuatu which is malarious.
As a result, I’ve seem malaria in all its forms and guises. I have participated in a variety of campaigns to prevent and reduce and interfere with the parasite and its mosquito host. I’ve had the trucks with the malathion chug down the street trailing their clouds. I’ve been involved with indoor DDT spraying. I’ve run bed-net programs. I’ve put oil in tanks and ponds to kill the mosquito larvae. It was a constant drain on the crews and staffs I ran in the Solomon Islands. Someone was always sick, someone was always out, someone was always sweating or shivering.
Here’s my take on this study. In India, the malaria is seasonal with the monsoon. Will the timing and location of the monsoon rains change in the future? Well, they always have changed in the past, so why wouldn’t they change?
Will the current generation of climate models help in planning for that? No way. No way at all. Even their promoters admit in private that they are useless, or worse, actively misleading, at a regional level.
But even if the models said that at some point in the future you’d get more rain in region X, or that you’d have earlier rains in region Y, how on earth would that help you? The climate models can’t predict what will happen in the oncoming monsoon season, which is what might help.
And even if the models someday could predict the monsoons locations and timing say seven times out of ten, I’m not sure what you’d do. The most cost effective means of preventing malaria are bed nets. But even if the models said this monsoon might be early and might hit hardest in the north, I wouldn’t gamble and put all the bed nets in the north.
Instead, I’d do what I assume they are doing now—watch and monitor and take preventive measures where and as needed, because the real need might end up being in the south.
So I’d see where the rains come, sure, and predict it if I could. But malaria is a disease and it spreads on its own strange timetable. One year you’ll have lots of rain and not much malaria. The next year you’ll have less rain, and more malaria. Who knew? It depends on timing and the life cycle of the mosquito, and the timing and cycle of the malaria parasite, and how many people are in an area, and how well they keep mosquito breeding pools down, and which travelers take the disease where, and a dozen other things.
For example, in the Solomons you could bet that in December and January you’d get an upsurge in the malaria cases. But not because of the weather. The problem was kids coming home from the boarding schools, which the main kind of grade schools there. The boarding schools often didn’t have bed nets and as a consequence had endemic malaria. When they came back to their towns and villages, they brought the malaria with them.
But even knowing that was coming, every year like clockwork, didn’t help in the fight. All you could do is do what you could to protect yourself, and then brace against the inevitable onslaught of malaria-ridden mosquitoes in December.
And anyone who thinks that a climate model could help with that hasn’t thought it through. The reality is you have to fight malaria as, when, and where it develops, not where it’s predicted to develop.
Regards to all,
w.
johanna,
No prosperity= no swamp draining & no DDT or malathion. Intercorrelated variables. Drain the swamps and spray for mosquitos, particularly where there is an infected population. Unfortunately, there are places that could afford to take these steps but due to their misguided “green” thinking will not allow for use of the pesticides or damaging “wetlands”. This also gives a perfect excuse to those in charge to not do anything to help and more money with which they can abscond &/or give to their friends and relatives (supporters), same thing.
johanna says in part: “But the main determinant of whether or not a person gets malaria in this day and age is their income, and the prosperity of the society they live in. That is why there is no malaria to speak of in northern Europe, or Canada, or Australia …” Not exactly. The reason why there is no malaria to speak of in norther Europe, Canada or Australia – or the U.S. I would add – is because those places sprayed DDT in quanties that supressed the mosquito populations carrying the disease(s). The other nations, to their great misfortune, depended upon money and DDT from those nations in order to supress their own malaria. After the disgusting ban on DDT in the U.S. in 1972 by the EPA – whose director admitted he didn’t read the evidence! – those nations whose DDT programs were incomplete lost funding for it and stopped using it (benighted as they were, in those days they believed whatever was published in America and Western Europe as being true and accurate) and thereby retained the mosquitoes and the malaria – and dengue and black fly blindness and …. The efforts of upper class, well-educated, liberals in America and in Europe caused the deaths of millions of men, women and children and crippled milions more in those societies. I would point out that any efforts which attempt to reduce or have the effect of reducing the prosperity of those nations today – regardless of the asserted intention or purpose of such efforts – merely continues that history of the murders of those who live in such societies.
15 miles from my home town there was a Malaria case. Then 2 others inside 30 miles.
When I was a kid, we had the ‘smoke trucks’ going through town in summer to kill mosquitoes. In school we learned to dump any standing water and stock mosquito fish.
This was in California. NORTHERN California. 30 miles from Chico (which is also in Malaria Country). Why is California not red? Because it’s risk map and the risk is low because we do things to kill mosquitoes. During the Gold Rush, the ’49ers got malaria from mosquitoes up in snow country in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The involved mosquito has been found at 7000 foot elevation. It’s cold there.
The notion that malaria is related to the tropics is dumb and ignorant. The reason we don’t have malaria in California has nothing to do with weather, it has a lot to do with the things that show up on a web search of malaria control in California:
http://duckduckgo.com/?t=ous&q=california+malaria+control
(“duckduckgo” is a search engine that does not snoop on you like Google does. Chrome also snoops on you. )
Look again at that risk map. As already pointed out; places with money and places with modern societies that kill mosquitoes have low malaria risk. Don’t kill the mosquitoes, you will get malaria even in Alaska and Canada:
http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Canada/malaria_in_canada.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Gold_Rush
So here’s the deal: Don’t control the mosquitoes and have some folks with unmedicated malaria walking around, you WILL get Malaria reestablished in Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Europe, New York, etc.
It has NOTHING to do with warming (global or otherwise) and has everything to do with summer and rains.
Malaria is usually restricted to tropical and subtropical areas (see map) and altitudes below 1,500 m
Significant portions of the Red Zone on that map lie *well* above the 1.500 meter line.
Johanna pegged it.
Just looked back at this after a few days.
Willis, thanks for providing a few more variables that the authors of this stupid study missed. I didn’t know that there are successful treatments for malaria these days. My old man caught it in Korea in the 1950s and suffered decades of recurrences, complete with sweats, terrible nightmares and general inability to function. And he was one of the lucky ones – he didn’t die.
The money that paid for this crap ‘research’ might have been used to actually help (in proven ways) people who have, or are at risk of, malaria. It is disgraceful that when we know how to fix at least most of this dreadful problem, money is being wasted on computer models.