Transmission pattern and climatic effects as for the hand-foot-mouth disease

Abstract

Objective To study the transmission parameters of hand-foot-mouth (HFM) disease and the effects of climate on the incidence, by focusing on the HFM infection in Guangxi Province. Method A TSIR model was employed to analyze the transmission parameters. Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression model, generalized additive model and random forest model used to reveal the effects of climate on HFM disease transmission. Results The result indicates that the reporting rate and the infection rate were 0.37 and 0.00035, respectively, with the size of susceptible individuals as about 490 thousand. Since Guangxi has a subtropical monsoon climate, the study shows that the strongest influence on HFM infection is temperature and followed by rainfall through the Pearson correlation coefficients as 0.55 and 0.4, respectively. Incidence linearly grows with increase of temperature, but the rainfall-HFMD relationship was shown as an approximately inverted U shape curve, with a threshold as 10.5mm. Conclusion Low reporting rate, high infection rate, and huge susceptible people, indicated the severity of HFM infections in Guangxi Province. Evident influence of climate on the incidence illustrates that climate can be used as an indicator for the disease control.