Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jul 24, 2023
Date Accepted: Mar 5, 2024
Modelling the regional distribution of international travelers in Spain to estimate imported cases of dengue and malaria: statistical inference and validation study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Understanding the patterns of disease importation through international travel is paramount for effective public health interventions and global disease surveillance. While global airline network data has been utilized to assist in outbreak prevention and effective preparedness, accurately estimating how these imported cases disseminate locally in receiving countries remains challenging.
Objective:
To describe and understand the regional distribution of imported cases of dengue and malaria upon their arrival in Spain via air travel.
Methods:
We propose a method to describe these regional distributions, based on the computation of a “travelers’ index” from readily available socioeconomic data. We validate our estimates comparing them with the reported cases of malaria and dengue in Spain during 2015-2019.
Results:
The estimates provided by the best fitted model showed high correlation with notified cases of malaria (0.94) and dengue (0.87), with economic motivations being the most relevant for imported cases of malaria and visits to friends and relatives for dengue imported cases.
Conclusions:
Factual descriptions of the local movement of international travelers may improve substantially the design of cost-effective prevention policies and control strategies, and pose an essential contribution to decision-support systems. Our approach contributes in this direction by providing a reliable estimate of the risk of imported cases of non-endemic diseases, which could be generalized to other applications.
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Copyright
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