Seasonal Patterns of Infectious Diseases 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Perspectives Seasonal Patterns of Infectious Diseases Mercedes Pascual*, Andy Dobson M eningococcal meningitis in western Africa shows recurrent seasonal patterns from year to year so important? Isn’t it more important for us to instead understand the effects of long-term climate change on human health? At ?rst sight, understanding seasonal patterns seems disconnected from understanding the impact of long-term climate change. However, seasonal patterns are one major pathway for the subtle but potentially drastic effects of climate change on disease dynamics. Long-term climate change affects seasonal patterns through the lengthening of the transmission season and the crossing of environmental and demographic thresholds that underlie seasonal outbreaks [2]. Thus, identifying the speci?c In other words, there are only weak correlations between seasonal variations and climate variables at small scales because of the multiple other factors that play a local role and act as noise. But we should be cautious about the suggestion that appropriate larger scales will always resolve the problem of local variability and present strong linear associations between climate and disease. Public health measures might require predictions not only at national and regional scales, but also at a variety of smaller scales. every year. Epidemics typically start at the beginning of February and last until May. We can try to explain the observed patterns on the basis of some seasonally varying environmental factor that favors disease transmission. Air dryness produced by strong dust winds is the most likely candidate. But while there are qualitative “stories” of this kind in the literature for many seasonal phenomena, convincing quantitative evidence to support them remains largely elusive. Instead, we tend to see weak associations between environmental and transmission variables when measured by simple, linear correlations. The study of meningococcal me