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Climate Change and Human Health Literature Portal Weather as an effective predictor for occurrence of dengue fever in Taiwan

Climate Change and Human Health Literature Portal

Wu P-C, Guo H-R, Lung S-C, Lin C-Y, Su H-J
2007
Acta Tropica. 103 (1): 50-57

We evaluated the impacts of weather variability on the occurrence of dengue fever in a major metropolitan city, Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan using time-series analysis. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models showed that the incidence of dengue fever was negatively associated with monthly temperature deviation (β = −0.126, p = 0.044), and a reverse association was also found with relative humidity (β = −0.025, p = 0.048). Both factors were observed to present their most prominent effects at a time lag of 2 months. Meanwhile, vector density record, a conventional approach often applied as a predictor for outbreak, did not appear to be a good one for diseases occurrence. Weather variability was identified as a meaningful and significant indicator for the increasing occurrence of dengue fever in this study, and it might be feasible to be adopted for predicting the influences of rising average temperature on the occurrence of infectious diseases of such kind at a city level. Further studies should take into account variations of socio-ecological changes and disease transmission patterns to better propose the increasing risk for infectious disease outbreak by applying the conveniently accumulated information of weather variability.

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Resource Description

    Ecosystem Change, Meteorological Factor, Precipitation, Temperature
    • Ecosystem Change, Meteorological Factor, Precipitation, Temperature: Variability
    Tropical, Urban, Other Geographic Feature, Specify
    • Tropical, Urban, Other Geographic Feature, Specify: subtropical
    Non-United States
    • Non-United States: Asia
    Infectious Disease
    • Infectious Disease: Vectorborne Disease
      • Vectorborne Disease: Mosquito-borne Disease
        • Mosquito-borne Disease: Dengue
        Mosquito-borne Disease
      Vectorborne Disease
    Outcome Change Prediction
    Inter-Annual (1-10 years)
    Research Article
    Adaptation
    • Adaptation: Adaptation Co-Benefit/Co-Harm, Early Warning System, Vulnerability Assessment
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