Abstract
Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne virus that infects 50–100 million people each year1. Of these infections, 200,000–500,000 occur as the severe, life-threatening form of the disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF)2. Large, unanticipated epidemics of DHF often overwhelm health systems3. 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 decomposition4 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 dynamics5,6. 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.
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Acknowledgements
We thank O. Bjornstad for making R code available.This work was supported by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Joint Program on Climate Variability and Human Health (a consortium including the EPA, NASA, NSF and EPRI), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Supplementary information
41586_2004_BFnature02225_MOESM1_ESM.jpg
Supplementary Figure 1: Spatial phase coherence function of three-year mode of variance in DHF Incidence in Thailand. (JPG 22 kb)
41586_2004_BFnature02225_MOESM2_ESM.jpg
Supplementary Figure 2: Lags of Maximum Correlation (of CCF from Figure 5 in text) as a function of distance from Bangkok. (JPG 45 kb)
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Cummings, D., Irizarry, R., Huang, N. et al. Travelling waves in the occurrence of dengue haemorrhagic fever in Thailand. Nature 427, 344–347 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02225
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02225
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