Climate drives the spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus in China

Abstract

Scrub typhus is a climate-sensitive and life-threatening vector-borne disease that poses a growing public health threat. Although the climate-epidemic associations of many vector-borne diseases have been studied for decades, the impacts of climate on scrub typhus remain poorly understood, especially in the context of global warming.Here we incorporate Chinese national surveillance data on scrub typhus from 2010 to 2019 into a climate-driven generalized additive mixed model to explain the spatiotemporal dynamics of this disease and predict how it may be affected by climate change under various representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for three future time periods (the 2030s, 2050s, and 2080s). Our results demonstrate that temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity play key roles in driving the seasonal epidemic of scrub typhus in mainland China with a 2-month lag. Our findings show that the change of projected spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus will be heterogeneous and will depend on specific combinations of regional climate conditions in future climate scenarios. Our results contribute to a better understanding of spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus, which can help public health authorities refine their prevention and control measures to reduce the risks resulting from climate change.

Molecular epidemiological study of Scrub Typhus in residence, farm and forest habitats from Yunnan Province, China

“…The occurrence of both of these situations will have the result of the migration of rodents to residential habitats [ 34 ]. It is suggested that the risk of scrub typhus may change significantly under the rapid environmental changes in humans [ 35 ].…”

Projecting spatiotemporal dynamics of severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome in the mainland of China

“…The GAM that has been successfully used to simulate other vector‐borne disease (i.e., scrub typhus; Ding et al, 2022) was performed to explore the associations between monthly the number of SFTS cases and nine explanatory variables. The explanatory variables included climate factors (mean temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation), land cover data (proportion of cropland, shrubland, grassland, forest), terrain data, and the environmental suitability of H. longicornis .…”

Spatiotemporal heterogeneity and long-term impact of meteorological, environmental, and socio-economic factors on scrub typhus in China from 2006 to 2018

“…Previous studies have found significant correlations between climate factors and the spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus [ 10 , 12 ]. For instance, scrub typhus in southern China and northern Japan primarily occurs during the summer [ 13 , 14 ], while in northern China and South Korea, it mainly occurs in autumn and winter [ 13 , 15 ].…”

“…Several studies [ 16 – 20 ] have investigated the relationship between climate factors and the epidemiology of scrub typhus using statistical models. Ding et al [ 12 ] examined the impact of climate on the spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus through a generalized additive mixed model. Zheng et al [ 20 ], analyzed the spatial heterogeneity of scrub typhus in southern China using an enhanced regression tree modeling procedure that considered multiple spatial correlations.…”