Dengue Fever Outbreak Prediction

Dengue fever is endemic in over 100 countries and there are an estimated 50 - 100 million cases annually. There is no vaccine for dengue fever yet, and the mortality rate of the severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever, ranges from 10-20% but may be greater than 40% if dengue shock occurs. A predictive method for dengue fever would forecast when and where an outbreak will occur before its emergence. This is a challenging task and truly predictive models for emerging infectious diseases are still in their infancy.

Objective

This paper addresses the problem of predicting high incidence rates of dengue fever in Peru several weeks in advance.