Spatiotemporal epidemiology of scarlet fever in Jiangsu Province, China, 2005–2015

Abstract

BackgroundA marked increase in the incidence rate of scarlet fever imposed a considerable burden on the health of children aged 5 to 15 years. The main purpose of this study was to depict the spatiotemporal epidemiological characteristics of scarlet fever in Jiangsu Province, China in order to develop and implement effective scientific prevention and control strategies.MethodsSmoothed map was used to demonstrate the spatial distribution of scarlet fever in Jiangsu Province. In addition, a retrospective space-time analysis based on a discrete Poisson model was utilized to detect clusters of scarlet fever from 2005 to 2015.ResultsDuring the years 2005–2015, a total of 15,873 scarlet fever cases occurred in Jiangsu Province, with an average annual incidence rate of 1.87 per 100,000. A majority of the cases (83.67%) occurred in children aged 3 to 9 years. Each year, two seasonal incidence peaks were observed, the higher occurring between March and July, the lower between November and the following January. The incidence in the southern regions of the province was generally higher than that in the northern regions. Seven clusters, all of which occurred during incidence peaks, were detected via space-time scan statistical analysis. The most likely cluster and one of the secondary clusters were detected in the southern and northern high endemic regions, respectively.ConclusionThe prevalence of scarlet fever in Jiangsu Province had a marked seasonality variation and was relatively endemic in some regions. Children aged 3 to 9 years were the major victims of this disease, and kindergartens and primary schools were the focus of surveillance and control. Targeted strategies and measures should be taken to reduce the incidence.

Epidemiological study of scarlet fever in Shenyang , China

“…According to our study, the incidence of scarlet fever was higher among males than among females, which is consistent with other findings [9][10][33][34] . The number of scarlet fever cases was the highest among children aged 3-11 years and accounted for 96.89%.The WHO and Public Health UK stated that a high-risk group of scarlet fever was among children 5-15 years old [35][36] .…”

“…There were fewer cases in February, and the number of cases increased sharply from March to June, the first peak occurred in June. The number of cases decreased from July to August and increased again between September and December, the second peak appeared in December, which is consistent with the findings of previous studies [9][10][31][32] . In China, March-June and September-December are school days, and January-February and July-August are school holidays.…”

“…In this study, We found that the incidence of scarlet fever in Shenyang in 2018 is higher than that in Beijing [10] during 2005-2014(14.25 per 100,000) and Jiangsu [9] during 2005-2015(1.87 per 100,000),and is higher than the average annual incidence of the whole country [32] during 2003-2010(1.58 per 100,000) and during 2011-2016(4.14 per 100,000).We also found that the incidence of scarlet fever in 2018 was the highest since the outbreak of scarlet fever in 2011 in Shenyang [13][14] .…”

“…The time distribution of scarlet fever is highly consistent with school and vacation time. Children aged [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] accounted for the vast majority of all scarlet fever cases. Prompting us that scarlet fever may have obvious aggregation in kindergartens and primary schools and it may be important to focus on the prevention and control of scarlet fever in kindergartens and primary schools.…”

“…As a useful tool, geographic information system (GIS) has been widely applied in infectious diseases surveillance [6][7][8] . However, few studies [9][10] have focused on the spatiotemporal characteristics of scarlet fever. In Shenyang , some researchers described the epidemiology of scarlet fever [11][12][13][14] , but none explored the spatiotemporal patterns.In our study, we used Excel 2010 and ArcGIS 10.3 to depict the spatiotemporal characteristics of scarlet fever in Shenyang followed the methods of Qi Zhang et al,2017 [9] .The objective of our study was to describe the temporal and spatial epidemic characteristics of scarlet fever in Shenyang and explore the socio-demographic and geographic risk factors affecting the epidemic of scarlet fever in order to provide scientific basis for the prevention and control measures of scarlet fever in Shenyang.…”