Risk assessment of cholera epidemic in Cameroon

Risk assessment and forecasting are vital for the development of preparedness and response to epidemics. Despite the age-long burden of cholera around the world, cholera epidemics are still a recurrent health challenge in Cameroon. This research contributes to the risk assessment of cholera in Cameroon by examining the influence of climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic factors on a cholera outbreak. The assessment involved identifying, evaluating, and aggregating the cholera risk factors to construct a spatial risk index using the INFORM conceptual equal weighting framework. Our findings reveal that not all indicators identified in the literature are relevant to cholera incidences in the context of Cameroon. Cholera is endemic in Cameroon but is more prominent in the southern regions of Cameroon. We show that the risk index developed in this study is statistically valid for the cholera incidence over the period considered. Although this assessment provides an overview of the risk levels of the regions in Cameroon, it may not be useful for estimating epidemic risk at a higher resolution. Further studies should be conducted to assess localized trends of cholera in relation to identified risk factors.