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. 2022 Sep 20;17(9):e0274325.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0274325. eCollection 2022.

Spatial modeling and ecological suitability of monkeypox disease in Southern Nigeria

Temitope Emmanuel Arotolu  1   2   3 , Ayoola Ebenezer Afe  4 , HaoNing Wang  5 , JiaNing Lv  3 , Kun Shi  6 , LiYa Huang  7 , XiaoLong Wang  1   2   3
Affiliations

Spatial modeling and ecological suitability of monkeypox disease in Southern Nigeria

Temitope Emmanuel Arotolu et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The reemergence of monkeypoxvirus (MPXV) in 2017 after about 39 years of no reported cases in Nigeria, and the recent incidence in countries such as the United States of America, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Israel which have been reportedly linked with travelers from Africa, have heightened concern that MPXV may have emerged to occupy the vacant ecological and immunological niche created by the extinct smallpox virus. This study was carried out to identify environmental conditions and areas that are environmentally suitable (risky areas) for MPXV in southern Nigeria. One hundred and sixteen (116) spatially unique MPXV occurrence data from 2017-2021 and corresponding environmental variables were spatially modeled by a maximum entropy algorithm to evaluate the contribution of the variables to the distribution of the viral disease. A variance inflation analysis was adopted to limit the number of environmental variables and minimize multicollinearity. The five variables that contributed to the suitability model for MPXV disease are precipitation of driest quarter (47%), elevation (26%), human population density (17%), minimum temperature in December (7%), and maximum temperature in March (3%). For validation, our model had a high AUC value of 0.92 and standard deviation of 0.009 indicating that it had excellent ability to predict the suitable areas for monkeypox disease. Categorized risk classes across southern states was also identified. A total of eight states were predicted to be at high risk of monkeypox outbreak occurrence. These findings can guide policymakers in resources allocation and distribution to effectively implement targeted control measures for MPXV outbreaks in southern Nigeria.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Study Area: A–Southern Nigeria; B–Nigeria (study area in red).
Fig 2
Fig 2. Average receiver operating characteristics [36] and related area under the curve (AUC) of the 100 bootstrap replicates.
Fig 3
Fig 3
Response curves of predictive continuous variables ((a) precipitation of driest quarter, (b) elevation, (c) human population density, (d) minimum temperature in December, and (e) maximum temperature in March) for monkey pox suitability in southern Nigeria. The red lines indicate the mean values while the blue lines denote the standard deviation.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Summary of the Jackknife analysis performed to determine importance of each environmental variable.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Ecological suitability map of monkeypox disease in southern Nigeria.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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