The Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease (HFMD) is the most common infectious disease in China. In recent years, some epidemiologists had tried to explore the influencing factors of HFMD. Prof. WANG Jinfeng, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) and his colleagues have studied the Spatiotemporal Transmission and Climate of HFMD for several years.

Bayesian Maximum Entropy (BME) method and self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm were used to extract the space-time models of HFMD cases and the corresponding meteorological factors (12 factors) based on the normalized data of 1456 counties in the southwest of China from May 1 2008 to March 27 2009, where BME technique was used for geostatistical space-time prediction of the meteorological indicators’ value at unsampled locations in the study area (i.e. 1456 counties), and SOM algorithm is as a topologically ordered method to handle and map efficiently multi-dimensional information (that is to map the HFMD cases and the corresponding meteorological factors onto a visible two-dimensional plane so that can be directly compared), which makes SOM outperform the other mature methods such as hierarchical, k-means.

Through the spatiotemporal analysis and comparison between the HFMD cases and the corresponding meteorological factors, the research team found some regularity of the occurrence of HFMD in a composite space-time domain rather than simple temporal and spatial variation; simultaneously. HFMD cases were geographically clustered in some regions and closely related to the monthly precipitation. In addition, researchers also applied data exploratory analysis and the compound method (i.e. BME-SOM) to other climate indicators and found the pressure behavior during the 11 months was opposite from the incidence distribution, temperature variation was the opposite behavior from that of pressure variation. So it seems to suggest a certain similarity between temperature and HFMD variation.

The conclusion makes it possible to forecast the risk of a disease outbreak by atmospheric science and weather report. Therefore, some intervention and prevention measures can be timely focus on the HFMD risk areas (especially kindergartens and junior schools) during the risk periods.

The related research results have been published in International Journal of Health Geographics, 2011.