Climate influences on meningitis incidence in northwest Nigeria

In this study, the influence of climate on monthly meningitis incidence was examined. Monthly counts of clinically diagnosed hospital-reported cases of meningitis were collected from three hospitals in northwest Nigeria for the 22-yr period spanning 1990-2011.

Generalized additive models and generalized linear models were fitted to aggregated monthly meningitis counts. Explanatory variables included monthly time series of maximum and minimum temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, sunshine, and dustiness from weather stations nearest to the hospitals, and the number of cases in the previous month. The effects of other unobserved seasonally varying climatic and nonclimatic risk factors that may be related to the disease were collectively accounted for as a flexible monthly varying smooth function of time in the generalized additive models, s(t).