Why the growth of arboviral diseases necessitates a new generation of global risk maps and future projections.

Global risk maps are an important tool for assessing the global threat of mosquito and tick-transmitted arboviral diseases. Public health officials increasingly rely on risk maps to understand the drivers of transmission, forecast spread, identify gaps in surveillance, estimate disease burden, and target and evaluate the impact of interventions. Here, we describe how current approaches to mapping arboviral diseases have become unnecessarily siloed, ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of different data types and methods.

Unraveling the drivers of MERS-CoV transmission.

With more than 1,700 laboratory-confirmed infections, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) remains a significant threat for public health. However, the lack of detailed data on modes of transmission from the animal reservoir and between humans means that the drivers of MERS-CoV epidemics remain poorly characterized. Here, we develop a statistical framework to provide a comprehensive analysis of the transmission patterns underlying the 681 MERS-CoV cases detected in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) between January 2013 and July 2014.

Estimating the Severity and Subclinical Burden of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Infection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Not all persons infected with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) develop severe symptoms, which likely leads to an underestimation of the number of people infected and an overestimation of the severity. To estimate the number of MERS-CoV infections that have occurred in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we applied a statistical model to a line list describing 721 MERS-CoV infections detected between June 7, 2012, and July 25, 2014. We estimated that 1,528 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1,327, 1,883) MERS-CoV infections occurred in this interval, which is 2.