Modeling the epidemiological history of plague in Central Asia: Palaeoclimatic forcing on a disease system over the past millennium

BMC Biology

Research Article

Tamara Ben Ari¹  Claudia Junge¹  Nils Chr Stenseth¹  Kyrre Linné Kausrud¹  Hildegunn Viljugrein¹  Lei Xu²  Ulf Büntgen³  Jan Esper⁴  Herwig Leirs⁵  Bao Yang⁶  Mike Begon⁷  Meixue Yang⁸ 

[1] Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Dept. of Biology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1066, N-0316, Oslo, Norway;Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Dept. of Biology, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1066, N-0316, Oslo, Norway;State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management on Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing, China;Dendro Sciences Unit, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland;Department of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 55099, Mainz, Germany;Dept. of Biology, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020, Antwerp, Belgium;Dept. of Integrated Pest Management, Danish Pest Infestation Laboratory, University of Aarhus, Skovbrynet 14, DK-2800, Lyngby, Kongens, Denmark;Key Laboratory of Desert and Desertification, Cold and Arid Regions, Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 730000, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China;School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, L69 7ZB, Liverpool, UK;State Key Laboratory of Cryspheric Sciences, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 730000, Lanzhou, China;

关键词: Plague;    Yersinia Pestis;    Rodent Host;    Great Gerbil;    Wildlife Reservoir;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1741-7007-8-112

 received in 2010-04-19, accepted in 2010-08-27,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundHuman cases of plague (Yersinia pestis) infection originate, ultimately, in the bacterium's wildlife host populations. The epidemiological dynamics of the wildlife reservoir therefore determine the abundance, distribution and evolution of the pathogen, which in turn shape the frequency, distribution and virulence of human cases. Earlier studies have shown clear evidence of climatic forcing on contemporary plague abundance in rodents and humans.ResultsWe find that high-resolution palaeoclimatic indices correlate with plague prevalence and population density in a major plague host species, the great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus), over 1949-1995. Climate-driven models trained on these data predict independent data on human plague cases in early 20th-century Kazakhstan from 1904-1948, suggesting a consistent impact of climate on large-scale wildlife reservoir dynamics influencing human epidemics. Extending the models further back in time, we also find correspondence between their predictions and qualitative records of plague epidemics over the past 1500 years.ConclusionsCentral Asian climate fluctuations appear to have had significant influences on regional human plague frequency in the first part of the 20th century, and probably over the past 1500 years. This first attempt at ecoepidemiological reconstruction of historical disease activity may shed some light on how long-term plague epidemiology interacts with human activity. As plague activity in Central Asia seems to have followed climate fluctuations over the past centuries, we may expect global warming to have an impact upon future plague epidemiology, probably sustaining or increasing plague activity in the region, at least in the rodent reservoirs, in the coming decades.See commentary: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/108

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Kausrud et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.