Global Distribution Maps of the Leishmaniases
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- UFR Médecine, Université Montpellier 1 and UMR 'MiVEGEC', CNRS 5290/IRD 224, France
- CHRU de Montpellier, Centre National de Référence des Leishmanioses, France
- Harvard Medical School, United States
- Boston University, United States
- Boston Children's Hospital, United States
- National Institutes of Health, United States
- RTI International, United States
Abstract
The leishmaniases are vector-borne diseases that have a broad global distribution throughout much of the Americas, Africa and Asia. Despite representing a significant public health burden, our understanding of the global distribution of the leishmaniases remains vague, reliant upon expert opinion and limited to poor spatial resolution. A global assessment of the consensus of evidence for leishmaniasis was performed at a sub-national level by aggregating information from a variety of sources. A database of records of cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis occurrence was compiled from published literature, online reports, strain archives and GenBank accessions. These, with a suite of biologically relevant environmental covariates, were used in a boosted regression tree modelling framework to generate global environmental risk maps for the leishmaniases. These high-resolution evidence-based maps can help direct future surveillance activities, identify areas to target for disease control and inform future burden estimation efforts.
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Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Stephen Tollman, Wits University, South Africa
Version history
- Received: March 23, 2014
- Accepted: June 26, 2014
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 27, 2014 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 22, 2014 (version 2)
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Global Distribution Maps of the Leishmaniases
eLife 3:e02851.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.02851
Further reading
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