Monitoring hand, foot and mouth disease by combining search engine query data and meteorological factors.

Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) has been recognized as a significant public health threat and poses a tremendous challenge to disease control departments. To date, the relationship between meteorological factors and HFMD has been documented, and public interest of disease has been proven to be trackable from the Internet. However, no study has explored the combination of these two factors in the monitoring of HFMD.

Towards Identifying and Reducing the Bias of Disease Information Extracted from Search Engine Data.

The estimation of disease prevalence in online search engine data (e.g., Google Flu Trends (GFT)) has received a considerable amount of scholarly and public attention in recent years.

Spatio-temporal analysis of malaria vectors in national malaria surveillance sites in China.

Background: To reveal the spatio-temporal distribution of malaria vectors in the national malaria surveillance sites from 2005 to 2010 and provide reference for the current National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP) in China.

Methods: A 6-year longitudinal surveillance on density of malaria vectors was carried out in the 62 national malaria surveillance sites. The spatial and temporal analyses of the four primary vectors distribution were conducted by the methods of kernel k-means and the cluster distribution of the most widely distribution vector of An.