Zinhle's Personal arbovirusSA
This is a collaborative space for learning about methods related to risk assessment for arbovirus introduction and invasion. This will feed into Zinhle's PhD project on dengue (and possibly other arboviruses) in South Africa.
This project will use R to develop the codes. These codes can be run from an office or home desktop.
Using mosquito and climate data we will develop mathematical models to estimate the change in mosquito populations at different temperatures, which will in turn be used to to model dengue transmission dynamics.
Input data: Climate data and mosquito population data*.
Research question: What is the likelihood that an introduction of dengue fever will cause an outbreak in South Africa? Is dengue fever likely to become endemic if it is successfully introduced?
Aim: Identify and prioritize objectives for a dengue risk-assessment project that will investigate the likelihood of dengue fever causing an epidemic and/or becoming endemic in South Africa.
*Still waiting for the mosquito population data. We do not know the structure or the data format.