Heidi E Brown, Wangshu Mu, Mohammed Khan, Clarisse Tsang, Jian Liu, Daoqin Tong
College of Public Health, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
J Public Health Res. 2017 Sep 22;6(2):886. doi: 10.4081/jphr.2017.886. eCollection 2017 Sep 21.
Valley fever is a fungal infection occurring in desert regions of the U.S. and Central and South America. Environmental risk mapping for this disease is hampered by challenges with detection, case reporting, and diagnostics as well as challenges common to spatial data handling.
Using 12,349 individual cases in Arizona from 2006 to 2009, we analyzed risk factors at both the individual and area levels.
Risk factors including elderly population, income status, soil organic carbon, and density of residential area were found to be positively associated with residence of Valley fever cases. A negative association was observed for distance to desert and pasture/hay land cover. The association between incidence and two land cover variables (shrub and cultivated crop lands) varied depending on the spatial scale of the analysis.
The consistence of age, income, population density, and proximity to natural areas supports that these are important predictors of Valley fever risk. However, the inconsistency of the land cover variables across scales highlights the importance of how scale is treated in risk mapping.
谷热是一种发生在美国以及中美洲和南美洲沙漠地区的真菌感染。这种疾病的环境风险地图绘制受到检测、病例报告和诊断方面的挑战以及空间数据处理常见挑战的阻碍。
利用2006年至2009年亚利桑那州的12349例个体病例，我们在个体和区域层面分析了风险因素。
发现包括老年人口、收入状况、土壤有机碳和居民区密度在内的风险因素与谷热病例的居住地呈正相关。观察到与沙漠和牧场/干草土地覆盖的距离呈负相关。发病率与两个土地覆盖变量（灌木和耕地）之间的关联因分析的空间尺度而异。
年龄、收入、人口密度和与自然区域的接近程度的一致性支持这些是谷热风险的重要预测因素。然而，土地覆盖变量在不同尺度上的不一致突出了在风险地图绘制中处理尺度的重要性。
