Meteorological factors and its association with hand, foot and mouth disease in Southeast and East Asia areas: a meta-analysis

Since the late 1990s, hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) has become a common health problem that mostly affects children and infants in Southeast and East Asia. Global climate change is considered to be one of the major risk factors for HFMD. This study aimed to assess the correlation between meteo...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Epidemiology and infection 2019-01, Vol.147, p.1, Article e50
Main Authors:	Duan, Chunxiao, Zhang, Xuefeng, Jin, Hui, Cheng, Xiaoqing, Wang, Donglei, Bao, Cangjun, Zhou, Minghao, Ahmad, Tauseef, Min, Jie
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Biometeorology Children Climate change Confidence intervals Correlation analysis Correlation coefficients Data processing Epidemiology Hand-foot-and-mouth disease Health care Humidity Infants Infections Infectious diseases Meta-analysis Original Paper Outdoor air quality Precipitation Prevention Preventive medicine Rainfall Relative humidity Risk analysis Risk factors Statistics Studies Temperature effects Vaccines Wind speed
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	Since the late 1990s, hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) has become a common health problem that mostly affects children and infants in Southeast and East Asia. Global climate change is considered to be one of the major risk factors for HFMD. This study aimed to assess the correlation between meteorological factors and HFMD in the Asia-Pacific region. PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data and Weipu Database were searched to identify relevant articles published before May 2018. Data were collected and analysed using R software. We searched 2397 articles and identified 51 eligible papers in this study. The present study included eight meteorological factors; mean temperature, mean highest temperature, mean lowest temperature, rainfall, relative humidity and hours of sunshine were positively correlated with HFMD, with correlation coefficients (CORs) of 0.52 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.42-0.60), 0.43 (95% CI 0.23-0.59), 0.43 (95% CI 0.23-0.60), 0.27 (95% CI 0.19-0.35), 0.19 (95% CI 0.02-0.35) and 0.19 (95% CI 0.11-0.27), respectively. There were sufficient data to support a negative correlation between mean pressure and HFMD (COR = -0.51, 95% CI -0.63 to -0.36). There was no notable correlation with wind speed (COR = 0.10, 95% CI -0.03 to 0.23). Our findings suggest that meteorological factors affect the incidence of HFMD to a certain extent.
ISSN:	0950-2688 1469-4409