Surveillance of dengue fever virus: A review of epidemiological models and early warning systems

Abstract

Dengue fever affects over a 100 million people annually hence is one of the world's most important vector-borne diseases. The transmission area of this disease continues to expand due to many direct and indirect factors linked to urban sprawl, increased travel and global warming. Current preventative measures include mosquito control programs, yet due to the complex nature of the disease and the increased importation risk along with the lack of efficient prophylactic measures, successful disease control and elimination is not realistic in the foreseeable future. Epidemiological models attempt to predict future outbreaks using information on the risk factors of the disease. Through a systematic literature review, this paper aims at analyzing the different modeling methods and their outputs in terms of acting as an early warning system. We found that many previous studies have not sufficiently accounted for the spatio-temporal features of the disease in the modeling process. Yet with advances in technology, the ability to incorporate such information as well as the socio-environmental aspect allowed for its use as an early warning system, albeit limited geographically to a local scale. © 2012 Racloz et al.