Assessing health burden risk and control effect on dengue fever infection in the southern region of Taiwan

Cheng, Yi-Hsien; Lin, Yi-Jun; Chen, Szu-Chieh; You, Shu-Han; Chen, Wei-Yu; Hsieh, Nan-Hung; Yang, Ying-Fei; Liao, Chung-Min

Climatic factors such as rainfall and relative humidity affect the disease dynamics. 34 The temperature had the highest contribution to the dengue variability in the regions of Taiwan. 35 The present study integrated a dengue-mosquito-human transmission model, three temperature-dependent entomological parameters (n m , μ m , and S L ), with the concept of DALYs to estimate the temperature-varied R 0 and dengue disease burden. The extrinsic incubation rate (n m ) can be an index of mosquito vector competence and is deeply dependent on temperature change. 36, 37 Capturing all aspects of the disease is a daunting task, but newer temperature-dependent parameters that incorporate a more holistic view of the viral ecology can be implemented as new information on transmission models. Besides the three temperature-dependent parameters in the estimation of R 0 considered in this study, the other two mosquito-related parameters (transmission probability and biting rate) depend on the temperature and seasonality as well. Due to the lack of experimental data from previous studies, we applied the probabilistic approach to simulate the parameter distribution of these parameters.