Altitudinal Changes in Malaria Incidence in Highlands of Ethiopia and Colombia

Abstract

Altitude Sickness Whether the incidence of malaria will be (or has been) affected by the warming climate is poorly resolved. Global-scale analyses are fraught with technical difficulties, including problems with separating out changes resulting from destruction of mosquito habitat, insecticide use, and antimalarial drug use from multidecadal trends in climate change. Siraj et al. (p. 1154 ) performed parallel analyses of highland malaria in Ethiopia and Colombia to ask whether interannual changes in temperature could explain variation in malaria incidence with altitude. Modeling the data confirmed that malaria moves up in elevation in warmer years and allowed estimates of how many more millions of cases could be expected in tropical highland areas if the mean temperature increased by 1° to 3°C.