Travelling waves in the occurrence of dengue haemorrhagic fever in Thailand

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne virus that infects 50-100 million people each year. Of these infections, 200,000-500,000 occur as the severe, life-threatening form of the disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). Large, unanticipated epidemics of DHF often overwhelm health systems. An understanding...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature 2004-01, Vol.427 (6972), p.344-347
Main Authors: Burke, Donald S, Cummings, Derek A.T, Irizarry, Rafael A, Huang, Norden E, Endy, Timothy P, Nisalak, Ananda, Ungchusak, Kumnuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arboviral haemorrhagic fevers
Arboviroses
Biological and medical sciences
Culicidae
Dengue virus
Disease
Epidemics
Flavivirus
Geography
Human viral diseases
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Incidence
Infectious diseases
letter
Medical sciences
multidisciplinary
Resource allocation
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Severe Dengue - epidemiology
Thailand - epidemiology
Time Factors
Tropical viral diseases
Vector-borne diseases
Viral diseases
Viruses
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Summary:Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne virus that infects 50-100 million people each year. Of these infections, 200,000-500,000 occur as the severe, life-threatening form of the disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). Large, unanticipated epidemics of DHF often overwhelm health systems. An understanding of the spatial-temporal pattern of DHF incidence would aid the allocation of resources to combat these epidemics. Here we examine the spatial-temporal dynamics of DHF incidence in a data set describing 850,000 infections occurring in 72 provinces of Thailand during the period 1983 to 1997. We use the method of empirical mode decomposition to show the existence of a spatial-temporal travelling wave in the incidence of DHF. We observe this wave in a three-year periodic component of variance, which is thought to reflect host-pathogen population dynamics. The wave emanates from Bangkok, the largest city in Thailand, moving radially at a speed of 148 km per month. This finding provides an important starting point for detecting and characterizing the key processes that contribute to the spatial-temporal dynamics of DHF in Thailand.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/nature02225