A Geosimulation Tool to Assess Intervention Scenarios in Relation to the Spread of Infectious Disease and Environmental Factors

Several approaches have been proposed to model and simulate the spread ofinfectious diseases such as the West Nile virus (WNV). However, these approaches such asmathematical modeling and cellular automata have some weaknesses when trying to modeland simulate the influence of geographic and climatic features on the disease spread and thespatio-temporal interactions of various kinds of actors (e.g. mosquitoes, birds, mammalsand humans in the WNV case). In this context, we propose to apply a geosimulationapproach to remedy some shortcomings of current methods. Using such an approach wedeveloped WNV-MAGS, a tool allowing public health decision policy makers to assessseveral intervention scenarios in order to understand and estimate the magnitude of theevolution of the WNV in a large territory. The assessment and comparison of differentsimulation scenarios can help managers make informed decisions. Since WNV isparticularly sensitive to environmental changes, our tool allows a user to explore variousclimate scenarios (temperature and precipitation) in addition to intervention scenarios(larvicide treatments). Since numerous parameters influence such simulations, we carriedout calibrations of the models by using monitoring data (capture of mosquitoes, collectionof dead birds and application of larvicides on the ground) provided by various public healthorganizations for the southern part of the province of Quebec and the Ottawa metropolitanarea (Ontario). Furthermore, we are currently exploring avenues to produce a genericsolution to be applied to other zoonoses such as Lyme disease.