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Mapping Transmission Risk of Lassa Fever in West Africa: The Importance of Quality Control, Sampling Bias, and Error Weighting
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 8, p e100711 (2014), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2014
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2014.
-
Abstract
- Lassa fever is a disease that has been reported from sites across West Africa; it is caused by an arenavirus that is hosted by the rodent M. natalensis. Although it is confined to West Africa, and has been documented in detail in some well-studied areas, the details of the distribution of risk of Lassa virus infection remain poorly known at the level of the broader region. In this paper, we explored the effects of certainty of diagnosis, oversampling in well-studied region, and error balance on results of mapping exercises. Each of the three factors assessed in this study had clear and consistent influences on model results, overestimating risk in southern, humid zones in West Africa, and underestimating risk in drier and more northern areas. The final, adjusted risk map indicates broad risk areas across much of West Africa. Although risk maps are increasingly easy to develop from disease occurrence data and raster data sets summarizing aspects of environments and landscapes, this process is highly sensitive to issues of data quality, sampling design, and design of analysis, with macrogeographic implications of each of these issues and the potential for misrepresenting real patterns of risk.
- Subjects :
- Quality Control
Viral Diseases
Spatial Epidemiology
Epidemiology
media_common.quotation_subject
Geographic Mapping
lcsh:Medicine
Models, Biological
Risk Assessment
Sierra leone
Lassa Fever
Environmental protection
Zoonoses
Sampling design
Medicine and Health Sciences
medicine
Humans
lcsh:Science
Lassa fever
Selection Bias
media_common
Sampling bias
Selection bias
Disease surveillance
Multidisciplinary
Geography
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
lcsh:R
Biology and Life Sciences
medicine.disease
Africa, Western
Natural History of Disease
Infectious Diseases
Biogeography
Veterinary Diseases
Data quality
Topography, Medical
Veterinary Science
lcsh:Q
Risk assessment
Cartography
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 9
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....3f3ebd2bd59360ca6bf2a021732d92e1