Data_Melioidosis_1910_2014

The occurrence data set was comprised of geo-located records of human cases, animal cases and presence of B. pseudomallei in the environment derived from (i) peer reviewed literature and (ii) case reports (see Extended Data Figure 1, Panel a). For peer reviewed literature, we searched Pubmed, Genbank database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank), MLST database (http://bpseudomallei.mlst.net) and Eurosurveillance database (http://eurosurveillance.org) for studies describing human cases, animal cases or presence of B. pseudomallei in the environment between Jan 1,1920 and Dec 31, 2014 using the MeSH terms “melioidosis” or “pseudomallei”. No language restrictions were placed on these searches, however, only those citations with a full title and abstract were retrieved. We searched bibliographies from selected studies for secondary references. For case reports, we searched ProMED (http://www.promedmail.org), and Ministry of Health websites for each country. We also searched GoogleNews archives (http://news.google.co.utk/archive search) using the same search terms and country name for news and reports of melioidosis at a country level.

An occurrence was defined as the reporting of a case of melioidosis infection or identification of B. pseudomallei at an environmental sampling point. All occurrence data underwent manual review and automated quality control procedures to ensure information fidelity and precise geo-positioning (e.g. duplicate records were excluded). All available location information was extracted from each peer-reviewed article and case reports. If the literature reported cases at more than one location, we disaggregated the cases to separate occurrence records. Imported cases were included if clear information about the location where the infection originated was available, and these source locations were entered into the database. The site name was used together with all contextual information provided about the site position to determine its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates using Google Maps (https://www.maps.google.co.uk/). If the year of occurrence was not reported, the year of the publication or report was used. After processing, a total of 22,338 geo-located occurrences spanning a period from 1910 to 2014 were included.

Each of the 22,338 rows represents a single occurrence record of either human melioidosis case, animal melioidosis case or presence of B. pseudomallei in the environment. The fields contained in the database are as follows:

1. OCCURRENCE_ID: Unique identifier for each occurrence in the database after temporal and locational standardisation

2. OCCURRENCE_TYPE: Whether the record represents human melioidosis case, animal melioidosis case or presence of B. pseudomallei in the environment

3. OCCURRENCE_EXPORT: Whether the record represents the export event

4. SOURCE: The details of the source

5. YEAR: The year of occurrence

6. REGION: The region where the occurrence lies – values are East Asia & Pacific, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America & Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

7. COUNTRY: The name of the country where the occurrence lies

8. LOCATION: The name of the location where the occurrence lies

9. LAT: The latitudinal coordinate of the point or polygon centroid (WGS 1984 Datum)

10. LONG: The longitudinal coordinate of the point or polygon centroid (WGS 1984 Datum)