[Study on the association between temperature and the risk of injuries by animals in Guangdong Province].

To assess the association between temperature and risk of animal injury, and identifying vulnerable populations. Based on a time-stratified case-crossover design, the number of animal injuries monitored in hospitals of Guangdong Provincial Injury Surveillance System in 2011 and 2015-2016 was included, and the daily meteorological data were derived from the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis-Land, which was produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Conditional logistic regression combined with a distributed lagged nonlinear model was applied to analyze the association of temperature and animal-specific injuries. We also conducted stratified analysis by region, sex, age, occupation, and location of injury occurrence. There was an almost linear relationship between temperature and the occurrence of animal injury. The excess risk () of animal injury was 2.65% (95%: 2.27%-3.04%) for a 1 ℃ rise in temperature with much higher risk of occurrence (=9.34%, 95%: 7.57%-11.13%) for non-mammalian injury than that for mammalian injuries (=2.30%, 95%: 1.90%-2.70%). Stratified analysis revealed that the occurrence of animal injury was more susceptible to temperature influences in urban (=2.78%, 95%: 2.35%-3.21%), female (=2.71%, 95%: 2.16%-3.27%), the elderly aged 60 years and above (=3.05%, 95%: 1.65%- 4.47%), farmer (=4.66%, 95%: 3.03%-6.32%) and agricultural area (=10.63%, 95%: 7.57%-13.79%) than their correspondents. In terms of mammalian injury, dog bites showed the highest risk (=2.71%, 95%: 2.12%-3.30%). In terms of non-mammalian,snake injuries were highly influenced by temperature (=16.74%, 95%: 11.33%-22.40%). The ambient temperature rises could increase the risk of animal injury with much higher risk for non-mammalian than that for mammalian injuries. Our findings suggest that global warming may increase the risk and disease burden from animal injuries.