asian dust storm elevates children’s respiratory health risks a spatiotemporal analysis of children’s clinic visits across taipei (taiwan)亚洲沙尘暴提升孩子的呼吸道健康风险的时空分析儿童诊所访问在台北(台湾).pdfVIP

Asian Dust Storm Elevates Children’s Respiratory Health Risks: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Children’s Clinic Visits across Taipei (Taiwan) 1 2 3 Hwa-Lung Yu , Lung-Chang Chien , Chiang-Hsing Yang * 1 Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 2 Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Health Behavior Research, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America, 3 Department of Health Care Management, National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Sciences, Taipei, Taiwan Abstract Concerns have been raised about the adverse impact of Asian dust storms (ADS) on human health; however, few studies have examined the effect of these events on children’s health. Using databases from the Taiwan National Health Insurance and Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency, this study investigates the documented daily visits of children to respiratory clinics during and after ADS that occurred from 1997 to 2007 among 12 districts across Taipei City by applying a Bayesian structural additive regressive model controlled for spatial and temporal patterns. This study finds that the significantly impact of elevated children’s respiratory clinic visits happened after ADS. Five of the seven lagged days had increasing percentages of relative rate, which was consecutively elevated from a 2-day to a 5-day lag by 0.63%,2.19% for preschool children (i.e., 0,6 years of age) and 0.72%,3.17% for school children (i.e., 7,14 years of age). The spatial pattern of clinic visits indicated that geographical heterogeneity was possibly associated with the clinic’s location and accessibility. Moreover, day-of-week effects were elevated on Monday, Friday, and Saturday. We con