Scientists said Wednesday they’ve found a way to forecast epidemic outbreaks of malaria up to five months in advance, a finding that could help authorities and drug providers plan prevention and treatment programs in Africa, where the infection kills more than 1 million people a year.

The American, Botswanan, and British researchers provide details of their method, which used a model of seasonal climate variation to predict disease-prone areas, in this week’s issue of the science journal Nature, due for publication on Thursday.

“Interannual climate variability is an important determinant of epidemics in parts of Africa where climate drives both mosquito vector dynamics and parasite development rates,” said the paper. “Hence, skillful seasonal climate forecasts may provide early warning changes of risk in epidemic-prone regions.”

Malaria is the most lethal human parasitic infection, accounting for more than a million deaths each year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite its significance in global public health, very few for-profit biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are designing drugs and vaccines to treat malaria. Both GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis are working on the problem, but the international drug industry’s lobby group, PhRMA, lists just two companies with treatments in clinical trials.

One of these, San Diego-based Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals, has temporarily given up on its drug, Immunitin, even though experiments have demonstrated it has rid most patients of malarial parasites within a week. Hollis-Eden fears compulsory licensing will swipe the revenue it expected when it began the program, the company told RedHerring.com.

The other firm, Immtech International, has a barbell-shaped molecule that enters malaria-infected red blood cells and lodges in the parasite’s DNA, preventing it from reproducing. Immtech, also a for-profit company, received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to work on malaria treatments (see Gates’ $258M Grant for Malaria).

“Where the Gates Foundation has gotten involved in these kinds of programs, it has revived why it is of interest to the U.S. public conscience, and also to the pharma conscience,” Immtech COO Stephen Thompson told RedHerring.com. “You might see a few more [companies] coming on board.”

Improved Prevention

While new drugs are still in development, the new model’s inventors say their work will help reduce the impact of epidemics by helping with methods such as insecticides, drug stocks, and other control measures.

Previous predictions based on precipitation monitoring gave about a month’s warning of an epidemic outbreak.

“The [new] forecast system is successfully applied to the prediction of malaria risk in Botswana, where links between malaria and climate variability are well established, adding up to four months’ lead times over malaria warnings issued with observed precipitation and having a comparably high level of probabilistic prediction skill,” said the paper.

Epidemic malaria has a lesser impact in Africa compared to endemic malaria, a disease that is constantly present in a region. About 124 million people are thought to be “at risk” of climate-related malaria epidemics in semi-arid and highland regions of the continent.