Assessing the potential impacts of climatic factors on food- and water-borne diseases in Taiwan

Purpose: Global warming has caused extreme climates and affected the environment, increasing incidence of infectious diseases. The pathogenic mechanisms of Food- and Water-borne diseases, such as number of pathogens and growth temperature range, might also be affected. We evaluated the correlation between several climatic factors and the occurrence of Food- and Water-borne diseases in Taipei City and New Taipei City. Methods: Weekly cases of Amoebic dysentery, Bacillary dysentery, Acute hepatitis A, Severe complicated enterovirus infection, Typhoid fever, and Listeria from 2009 to 2019 were adopted from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (Taiwan CDC). Mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, relative humidity (RH), and weekly accumulated rainfall were investigated as climatic factors. Generalized linear models with a Poisson distribution were used for regression analysis to explore correlations. Results: The cumulative number of cases reached a ten-year high in 2016 with the incidence rate 4.8 per 100,000 population. The cumulative trends of the order of diseases in two cities over the past ten-year were similar in Taipei City and New Taipei City. All correlations were significant (P value <0.05) except for weekly accumulated rainfall. Significant correlations exist between the number of disease cases and the individual climatic factors of mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, and RH. Conclusion: In multivariate models using all or all but one climatic factors, mean and maximum temperature were generally found to have significant correlations (P<0.05) for food- and water-borne disease.