Figures
North Pioa Mountain and coastal villages, Tutuila, American Samoa.
Also known as Rainmaker Mountain, North Pioa Mountain is the fourth highest peak in American Samoa, and has an average annual rainfall of 5,000 mm. This idyllic tropical environment is one of many in which leptospirosis has recently been identified as an emerging infectious disease. Risk factors for infection include high rainfall, flooding, urbanisation, poor sanitation, contact with animals, and environmental degradation. Accurate health data are often not available, making it difficult to develop and target public health intervention strategies. Lau et al. therefore devised a system of estimating infection risk based on environmental factors, and produced the first predictive risk maps for leptospirosis. Such maps have been successfully used to guide public health interventions for many other diseases, and are now available to help control this potentially lethal threat in American Samoa.
Image Credit: Colleen Lau and John DePasquale
Citation: (2012) PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases Issue Image | Vol. 6(5) May 2012. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 6(5): ev06.i05. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pntd.v06.i05
Published: May 29, 2012
Copyright: © 2012 Lau. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Also known as Rainmaker Mountain, North Pioa Mountain is the fourth highest peak in American Samoa, and has an average annual rainfall of 5,000 mm. This idyllic tropical environment is one of many in which leptospirosis has recently been identified as an emerging infectious disease. Risk factors for infection include high rainfall, flooding, urbanisation, poor sanitation, contact with animals, and environmental degradation. Accurate health data are often not available, making it difficult to develop and target public health intervention strategies. Lau et al. therefore devised a system of estimating infection risk based on environmental factors, and produced the first predictive risk maps for leptospirosis. Such maps have been successfully used to guide public health interventions for many other diseases, and are now available to help control this potentially lethal threat in American Samoa.
Image Credit: Colleen Lau and John DePasquale