Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Glob Chang Biol. 2022 Nov;28(22):6618-6628. doi: 10.1111/gcb.16395. Epub 2022 Sep 2.
Scrub typhus is a climate-sensitive and life-threatening vector-borne disease that poses a growing public health threat. Although the climate-epidemic associations of many vector-borne diseases have been studied for decades, the impacts of climate on scrub typhus remain poorly understood, especially in the context of global warming. Here we incorporate Chinese national surveillance data on scrub typhus from 2010 to 2019 into a climate-driven generalized additive mixed model to explain the spatiotemporal dynamics of this disease and predict how it may be affected by climate change under various representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for three future time periods (the 2030s, 2050s, and 2080s). Our results demonstrate that temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity play key roles in driving the seasonal epidemic of scrub typhus in mainland China with a 2-month lag. Our findings show that the change of projected spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus will be heterogeneous and will depend on specific combinations of regional climate conditions in future climate scenarios. Our results contribute to a better understanding of spatiotemporal dynamics of scrub typhus, which can help public health authorities refine their prevention and control measures to reduce the risks resulting from climate change.
恙虫病是一种气候敏感且危及生命的虫媒传染病，对公共卫生构成日益严重的威胁。尽管许多虫媒传染病的气候-流行关联已研究了数十年，但气候变化对恙虫病的影响仍知之甚少，特别是在全球变暖的背景下。在这里，我们将 2010 年至 2019 年中国国家恙虫病监测数据纳入气候驱动广义加性混合模型，以解释这种疾病的时空动态，并预测在三种未来时期（2030 年代、2050 年代和 2080 年代）各种代表性浓度路径（RCP）下气候变化可能如何影响它。我们的研究结果表明，温度、降水和相对湿度对中国大陆恙虫病的季节性流行起着关键作用，存在 2 个月的滞后。我们的研究结果表明，预测的恙虫病时空动态变化将具有异质性，并且将取决于未来气候情景中特定的区域气候条件组合。我们的研究结果有助于更好地了解恙虫病的时空动态，这有助于公共卫生当局完善其预防和控制措施，以降低气候变化带来的风险。
