Statistical monitoring of the hand, foot and mouth disease in China

Abstract

In a period starting around 2007, the Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease (HFMD) became wide-spreading in China, and the Chinese public health was seriously threatened. To prevent the outbreak of infectious diseases like HFMD, effective disease surveillance systems would be especially helpful to give signals of disease outbreaks as early as possible. Statistical process control (SPC) charts provide a major statistical tool in industrial quality control for detecting product defectives in a timely manner. In recent years, SPC charts have been used for disease surveillance. However, disease surveillance data often have much more complicated structures, compared to the data collected from industrial production lines. Major challenges, including lack of in-control data, complex seasonal effects, and spatio-temporal correlations, make the surveillance data difficult to handle. In this article, we propose a three-step procedure for analyzing disease surveillance data, and our procedure is demonstrated using the HFMD data collected during 2008-2009 in China. Our method uses nonparametric longitudinal data and time series analysis methods to eliminate the possible impact of seasonality and temporal correlation before the disease incidence data are sequentially monitored by a SPC chart. At both national and provincial levels, our proposed method can effectively detect the increasing trend of disease incidence rate before the disease becomes wide-spreading.

A descriptive analysis of the Spatio-temporal distribution of intestinal infectious diseases in China

“…According to the incidence rates recorded from 2006 to 2016, the temporal trends differed. Regarding the absolute incidence of cases, the incidence of HFMD was higher than the other IIDs, and it gradually became a wide-spread disease, which is consistent with the results from the study by Zhang [30]. Then, dysentery and OIDD were less severe diseases.…”

Control measures during the COVID-19 outbreak reduced the transmission of hand, foot, and mouth disease

“…We set k = 1, p = 0•4423, ω = 0•2, γ = 0•5, and γ’= 0•0476, according to our previous researches 16 , 20 . The range of the fatality rate was 0•0001–0•0005 22 , 23 , 24 , with a median of 0•0003; therefore, f= 003%. The birth rate ( br ) and mortality rate ( dr ) were collected from the statistical yearbooks announced by the Statistical Bureau of the Cities.…”

Seasonality of the transmissibility of hand, foot and mouth disease: a modelling study in Xiamen City, China

“…The range of course of asymptomatic infection 1/γ ′ was 2 to 4 weeks [3, 18, 19], with 3 weeks chosen as median (with a median of 3 weeks), that is, the recovery rate of the asymptomatic γ ′ = 0.0476. The range of the fatality rate was from 0.0001 to 0.0005 [23-25], with 0.0003 chosen as median (with a median of 5 days). The parameters β were estimated by curve fitting.…”