Comparison of Dengue Transmission in Lowland and Highland Area: Case Study in Semarang and Malang, Indonesia

Abstract

Dengue is a potentially lethal mosquito-borne disease, regarded as the most dangerous disease in the world. It is also a major health issue in tropical and subtropical countries. Environmental characteristics and sociocultural are factors which play a role in the spread of dengue. Different landscape structure such as lowland and highland areas are possible to give different infection rate on dengue transmission. Semarang and Malang are densely populated areas in Java, which are selected to be our study areas. A mathematical model (SIR-UV) is adapted to describe dengue transmission. Spiral dynamic optimization is applied to convert monthly data to weekly in Malang and estimate the infection rate that minimized the deviation between dengue data and simulation. This method produces a good fitting to the data. We compare the pattern of dengue cases from the simulation in both cities. Furthermore, we identify seasonal variations of the cases via Fourier series of the infection rate. We also investigate the correlation between humidity, infection rate, and dengue cases in Semarang and Malang. It reveals that humidity influences infection rate in 1-3 weeks later and the infection rate produces dengue cases in the next four weeks.