A natural focus of plague exists in the Western Usambara Mountains of Tanzania. Despite intense research, questions remain as to why and how plague emerges repeatedly in the same suite of villages. We used human plague incidence data for 1986–2003 in an ecological-niche modeling framework to explore the geographic distribution and ecology of human plague. Our analyses indicate that plague occurrence is related directly to landscape-scale environmental features, yielding a predictive understanding of one set of environmental factors affecting plague transmission in East Africa. Although many environmental variables contribute significantly to these models, the most important are elevation and Enhanced Vegetation Index derivatives. Projections of these models across broader regions predict only 15.5% (under a majority-rule threshold) or 31,997 km2 of East Africa as suitable for plague transmission, but they successfully anticipate most known foci in the region, making possible the development of a risk map of plague.
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机译:鼠疫的自然焦点存在于坦桑尼亚的西部乌桑巴拉山脉。尽管进行了广泛的研究,但关于为什么以及如何在同一组村庄中反复出现鼠疫的问题仍然存在。我们在生态位建模框架中使用了1986-2003年的人类鼠疫发病率数据来研究人类鼠疫的地理分布和生态。我们的分析表明,鼠疫的发生与景观尺度的环境特征直接相关,从而对一系列影响东非鼠疫传播的环境因素产生了预测性认识。尽管许多环境变量对这些模型做出了重要贡献,但最重要的是海拔和增强植被指数的衍生物。这些模型在更广泛的地区上的预测只预测了15.5%(在多数规则阈值以下)或31,997 km 2 sup>适宜于鼠疫传播的东非,但他们成功地预测了该地区最著名的疫源地,使制定鼠疫风险图成为可能。
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