Consensus and conflict among ecological forecasts of Zika virus outbreaks in the United States.

ABSTRACT: Ecologists are increasingly involved in the pandemic prediction process. In the course of the Zika outbreak in the Americas, several ecological models were developed to forecast the potential global distribution of the disease. Conflicting results produced by alternative methods are unresolved, hindering the development of appropriate public health forecasts. We compare ecological niche models and experimentally-driven mechanistic forecasts for Zika transmission in the continental United States. We use generic and uninformed stochastic county-level simulations to demonstrate the downstream epidemiological consequences of conflict among ecological models, and show how assumptions and parameterization in the ecological and epidemiological models propagate uncertainty and produce downstream m

SUBMITTER: Carlson CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5862882 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature