Abstract
Environmental and climate changes are potential drivers of the re-emergence of vector-borne diseases especially in areas where vectors are still prevailing. This situation is true for Fayoum governorate, Egypt, the last focus of malaria where vectors continue to breed. Thus, it is important to assess its vulnerability through understanding the underlying factors of malaria ecology at the time of disease occurrence in comparison with the current conditions. GIS and remote sensing technologies were utilized to retrospectively investigate the environmental, built, and socio-economic factors underlying malaria on the district-level between 1993 and 1995, where transmission was occurring. Discriminant models correctly classified 100% of the district risk categories and indicated that the most important predictor of risk was NDVI. A high positive correlation (r = 0.94) between mean NDVI in 1995 and 2017 at the study areas indicated that Fayoum is still vulnerable to malaria resurgence even after the observed land-use changes in recent years. These results are very useful for health authorities and can assist in building a proactive control preparedness plan.
(c) 2020 National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B. V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).