The global spread of malaria in a future, warmer world

The frequent warnings that global climate change will allow falciparum mala ria to spread into northern Latitudes, including Europe and Large parts of the United States, are based on biological transmission models driven princ ipally by temperature. These models were assessed for their value in predic ting present, and therefore future, malaria distribution. In an alternative statistical approach, the recorded present-day global distribution of falc iparum malaria was used to establish the current multivariate climatic cons traints. These results were applied to future climate scenarios to predict future distributions, which showed remarkably few changes, even under the m ost extreme scenarios.