Evaluating the impact of the weather conditions on the influenza propagation.
Background: Predicting the details of how an epidemic evolves is highly valuable as health institutions need to better plan towards limiting the infection propagation effects and optimizing their prediction and response capabilities. Simulation is a cost- and time-effective way of predicting the evo...
| Published in: | BMC Infectious Diseases Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Published: |
BioMed Central
4/5/2020
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=142576070&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 142576070 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 14712334 1CHU jtl: BMC Infectious Diseases issn: 14712334 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 4/5/2020 vid: 20 iid: 1 pid: 24147 pub: BioMed Central artinfo: ui: 142576070 142576070 NLM32248792 10.1186/s12879-020-04977-w NLM32248792 142576070 ppf: 1 ppct: 14 formats: tig: atl: Evaluating the impact of the weather conditions on the influenza propagation. aug: au: Singh, David E. Marinescu, Maria-Cristina Carretero, Jesus Delgado-Sanz, Concepcion Gomez-Barroso, Diana Larrauri, Amparo affil: Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganés, Spain sug: subj: Weather Influenza, Human Epidemiology Aged Immunization Middle Age Temperature Adolescence Young Adult Urban Population Humidity Sentinel Event Disease Outbreaks Spain Models, Theoretical Adult Impact of Events Scale Personal Resource Questionnaire Scales Aged: 65+ years Middle Aged: 45-64 years Adolescent: 13-18 years Adult: 19-44 years ab: Background: Predicting the details of how an epidemic evolves is highly valuable as health institutions need to better plan towards limiting the infection propagation effects and optimizing their prediction and response capabilities. Simulation is a cost- and time-effective way of predicting the evolution of the infection as the joint influence of many different factors: interaction patterns, personal characteristics, travel patterns, meteorological conditions, previous vaccination, etc. The work presented in this paper extends EpiGraph, our influenza epidemic simulator, by introducing a meteorological model as a modular component that interacts with the rest of EpiGraph's modules to refine our previous simulation results. Our goal is to estimate the effects of changes in temperature and relative humidity on the patterns of epidemic influenza based on data provided by the Spanish Influenza Sentinel Surveillance System (SISSS) and the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET).Methods: Our meteorological model is based on the regression model developed by AB and JS, and it is tuned with influenza surveillance data obtained from SISSS. After pre-processing this data to clean it and reconstruct missing samples, we obtain new values for the reproduction number of each urban region in Spain, every 10 minutes during 2011. We simulate the propagation of the influenza by setting the date of the epidemic onset and the initial influenza-illness rates for each urban region.Results: We show that the simulation results have the same propagation shape as the weekly influenza rates as recorded by SISSS. We perform experiments for a realistic scenario based on actual meteorological data from 2010-2011, and for synthetic values assumed under simplified predicted climate change conditions. Results show that a diminishing relative humidity of 10% produces an increment of about 1.6% in the final infection rate. The effect of temperature changes on the infection spread is also noticeable, with a decrease of 1.1% per extra degree.Conclusions: Using a tool like ours could help predict the shape of developing epidemics and its peaks, and would permit to quickly run scenarios to determine the evolution of the epidemic under different conditions. We make EpiGraph source code and epidemic data publicly available. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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