Eleven years of malaria surveillance in a Sudanese village highlights unexpected variation in individual disease susceptibility and outbreak severity

TY - JOUR

T1 - Eleven years of malaria surveillance in a Sudanese village highlights unexpected variation in individual disease susceptibility and outbreak severity

AU - Creasey, A

AU - Giha, H

AU - Hamad, A A

AU - El Hassan, I M

AU - Theander, T G

AU - Arnot, D E

N1 - Keywords: Adolescent; Adult; Animals; Child; Child, Preschool; Climate; Cohort Studies; Disease Susceptibility; Female; Humans; Infant; Longitudinal Studies; Malaria, Falciparum; Male; Middle Aged; Plasmodium falciparum; Pregnancy; Prevalence; Rural Population; Seasons; Sudan

PY - 2004

Y1 - 2004

N2 - An analysis is presented of continuous data collected over 11 years based on 1,902,600 person/days of observation on the malaria experience of the people of Daraweesh, a village in eastern Sudan. Malaria transmission is hypo-endemic: the acquisition of clinical immunity with age is not as obvious as in more holo-endemic areas and malaria remained a problem in all age groups throughout the study. However, this population, who are of Fulani origin, showed a distinctly variable level of disease susceptibility. Thirty-two percent of the village never reported malaria symptoms or required malaria treatment while others experienced up to 8 clinical episodes over the 11 years of observation. Malaria incidence was clearly influenced by drought but much less obviously by rainfall. To what extent outbreak patterns are explicable in terms of anopheline factors, and to human immune factors, remains an interesting question for malaria modelling in this, and in other low transmission zones, such as the burgeoning urban areas of modern Africa.

AB - An analysis is presented of continuous data collected over 11 years based on 1,902,600 person/days of observation on the malaria experience of the people of Daraweesh, a village in eastern Sudan. Malaria transmission is hypo-endemic: the acquisition of clinical immunity with age is not as obvious as in more holo-endemic areas and malaria remained a problem in all age groups throughout the study. However, this population, who are of Fulani origin, showed a distinctly variable level of disease susceptibility. Thirty-two percent of the village never reported malaria symptoms or required malaria treatment while others experienced up to 8 clinical episodes over the 11 years of observation. Malaria incidence was clearly influenced by drought but much less obviously by rainfall. To what extent outbreak patterns are explicable in terms of anopheline factors, and to human immune factors, remains an interesting question for malaria modelling in this, and in other low transmission zones, such as the burgeoning urban areas of modern Africa.

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 15471002

SN - 0031-1820

VL - 129

SP - 263

EP - 271

JO - Parasitology

JF - Parasitology

IS - Pt 3

ER -