Epidemiological characteristics, seasonality, trends of dog bite injuries, and relationship with meteorological data.

Introduction and objective: Animal bites are among the most critical in public health problems. Dogs are the leading cause of bite injuries. The study aimed to investigate the epidemiology and clinical features of dog bite cases admitted to an emergency department, as well as their temporal trends, seasonality, and tr relationship with meteorological data.

Material and methods: Study data comprised eight years (2012-2019) emergency room records of a tertiary center. Demographic characteristics of the cases, bite anatomical area, treatment applied, hospitalization, and death rates were determined. The incidence rates and distribution of meteorological data by years were examined using ANOVA and Kruskal Wallis tests. Seasonality and temporal trends were investigated for incidence rates using the additive decomposition technique. The temporal relationship of incidence rates with meteorological data was evaluated using the Autoregressive Distributed Delayed Boundary Test. Causality verification was perfoirmed using the Granger test.

Results: Dog bite cases consisted of 1,335 records of partients with a mean age of 26.6±0.2 years. Bite cases were most common in the 20-44 age group (44.7%), males (76.4%), and lower extremities (48.2%). The frequency of hospitalization was 4.1%. Annual incidence rates ranged from 52.7-49.9/100,000, with a non-significant increasing trend. The incidence of bites had two peaks, in June and August. A co-integration relationship was observed between incidence rates and air temperature and humidity levels (p<0.001).

Conclusions: Effective implementation of prevention programmes is needed for high-risk demographic groups. In addition, a national monitoring and reporting system could evaluate the effectiveness of any prevention programme and reduce the incedence of dog bites.