Abstract

We wish to respond to a number of statements made by Paul Reiter and colleagues1 on our article on malaria and global warming,2 in which we model duration of exposure to Plasmodium falciparum malaria and independently validate the model using 3791 presence/absence parasite surveys3 collected across Africa. Although we recognise that an important component of science is open debate, Reiter and colleagues made some inaccurate statements and hence misrepresentations of our work that need to be addressed. For example, Reiter and colleagues comment that we have modelled “merely duration of the transmission season”, which we interpret as “heightened transmission and increased incidence”.1 The first part of this statement is absolutely correct and modelling duration (and timing) of transmission season (for the first time at a continental scale) is exactly what we set out to achieve. The latter part of the statement regarding increased incidence is inaccurate as nowhere in the paper is incidence interpreted in the light of changes in person-months of exposure under global climate-change scenarios. The relation between population exposure and disease incidence is not straightforward and there are many contributing factors. To make such inference from our model—which is concerned with spatiotemporal population exposure—would not be valid.