Providing open access data online to advance malaria research and control.

Background: To advance research on malaria, the outputs from existing studies and the data that fed into them need to be made freely available. This will ensure new studies can build on the work that has gone before. These data and results also need to be made available to groups who are developing public health policies based on up-to-date evidence.

Global epidemiology of sickle haemoglobin in neonates: a contemporary geostatistical model-based map and population estimates.

Background: Reliable estimates of populations affected by diseases are necessary to guide efficient allocation of public health resources. Sickle haemoglobin (HbS) is the most common and clinically significant haemoglobin structural variant, but no contemporary estimates exist of the global populations affected. Moreover, the precision of available national estimates of heterozygous (AS) and homozygous (SS) neonates is unknown.

A global map of dominant malaria vectors.

Background: Global maps, in particular those based on vector distributions, have long been used to help visualise the global extent of malaria. Few, however, have been created with the support of a comprehensive and extensive evidence-based approach.

Methods: Here we describe the generation of a global map of the dominant vector species (DVS) of malaria that makes use of predicted distribution maps for individual species or species complexes.

Temperature and malaria trends in highland East Africa.

There has been considerable debate on the existence of trends in climate in the highlands of East Africa and hypotheses about their potential effect on the trends in malaria in the region. We apply a new robust trend test to mean temperature time series data from three editions of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit database (CRU TS) for several relevant locations. We find significant trends in the data extracted from newer editions of the database but not in the older version for periods ending in 1996.

The dominant Anopheles vectors of human malaria in the Asia-Pacific region: occurrence data, distribution maps and bionomic précis.

Background: The final article in a series of three publications examining the global distribution of 41 dominant vector species (DVS) of malaria is presented here. The first publication examined the DVS from the Americas, with the second covering those species present in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Here we discuss the 19 DVS of the Asian-Pacific region.

The international limits and population at risk of Plasmodium vivax transmission in 2009.

Background: A research priority for Plasmodium vivax malaria is to improve our understanding of the spatial distribution of risk and its relationship with the burden of P. vivax disease in human populations. The aim of the research outlined in this article is to provide a contemporary evidence-based map of the global spatial extent of P.

Developing global maps of the dominant anopheles vectors of human malaria.

Simon Hay and colleagues describe how the Malaria Atlas Project has collated anopheline occurrence data to map the geographic distributions of the dominant mosquito vectors of human malaria.