Identification of Health Risks of Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease in China Using the Geographical Detector Technique

Abstract

Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is a common infectious disease, causing thousands of deaths among children in China over the past two decades. Environmental risk factors such as meteorological factors, population factors and economic factors may affect the incidence of HFMD. In the current paper, we used a novel model—geographical detector technique to analyze the effect of these factors on the incidence of HFMD in China. We collected HFMD cases from 2,309 counties during May 2008 in China. The monthly cumulative incidence of HFMD was calculated for children aged 0–9 years. Potential risk factors included meteorological factors, economic factors, and population density factors. Four geographical detectors (risk detector, factor detector, ecological detector, and interaction detector) were used to analyze the effects of some potential risk factors on the incidence of HFMD in China. We found that tertiary industry and children exert more influence than first industry and middle school students on the incidence of HFMD. The interactive effect of any two risk factors increases the hazard for HFMD transmission.

Variations of dry eye disease prevalence by age, sex and geographic characteristics in China: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…More studies are still needed to explore if DED is a more prevalent condition among females, with a focus on different types of DED. In the exploration of geo-epidemiology of DED prevalence, increased latitude was found to be a risk factor for DED by symptoms and signs in our study, given that low relative humidity is a well-proven risk factor for DED [3,46], the negative relation of relative humidity and latitude in China may be the reason for this spatial distribution of DED by symptoms and signs [23,47,48]. The absence of a geographic variation of DED by symptoms may be due to the limited number of unique study sites, which was only 11.…”

Socioeconomic Drivers of PM2.5 in the Accumulation Phase of Air Pollution Episodes in the Yangtze River Delta of China

“…The geographical detector proposed by Wang et al [30] is a novel and suitable spatial analysis method to detect the influential force on certain geographic and environmental phenomena, which has been applied in many fields in recent years [31,32,33]. We used factor detector, one module of the geographical detector, to determinate the impact of socioeconomic indicators on PMAE in our study.…”

Factors associated with hand foot mouth disease among children in day care center, Chiang Rai, Thailand

“…Meanwhile the Thai National Disease Control Center reported that most of the HFMD outbreaks occurred in the day care center, and the risk factors were unregular hand washing of children and also limited knowledge on disease control and prevention among the caregivers in the day care center [21]. Huang et al also reported that economy and population density were risk factors of HFMD [22].…”