Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted all aspects of human life for over 3 years. Understanding the evolution of public risk perception during these periods is crucial. Few studies explore the mechanisms for reducing disease transmission due to risk perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The patterns of dengue are affected by many factors, including population density and climate factors. Densely populated areas could play a role in dengue transmission due to increased human-mosquito contacts, the presence of more diverse and suitable vector habitats and breeding sites, and changes in land use. In addition to population densities, climatic factors such as temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation have been demonstrated to predict dengue patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The unprecedented global outbreak of mpox in 2022 posed a public health challenge. In addition to the mpox vaccine campaign in the United States (US), community organisations and public health agencies initiated educational efforts to promote sexual risk reduction. This modelling study estimated the impact of the two-dose vaccination campaign and sexual behaviour changes coincident with high-risk group awareness on the mpox epidemic in the US.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIdentifying clusters or hotspots from disease maps is critical in research and practice. Hotspots have been shown to have a higher potential for transmission risk and may be the source of infections, making them a priority for controlling epidemics. However, the role of edge areas of hotspots in disease transmission remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDengue is one of the world's most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne viral diseases. As it is found mostly in urban and semi-urban areas, urbanization and associated human activities that affect the environment and larval habitats could become risk factors (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe rapid spread of a (re)emerging pandemic (e.g., COVID-19) is usually attributed to the invisible transmission caused by asymptomatic cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrop Med Infect Dis
August 2022
Background: During the COVID-19 outbreak in Taiwan between May 11 and June 20, 2021, the observed fatality rate (FR) was 5.3%, higher than the global average at 2.1%.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed a global threat to human health. In order to prevent the spread of this virus, many countries have imposed travel restrictions. This difficult situation has dramatically affected the airline industry by reducing the passenger volume, number of flights, airline flow patterns, and even has changed the entire airport network, especially in Northeast Asia (because it includes the original disease seed).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBuren, also known as the red imported fire ant (RIFA), has had a large negative impact on human and livestock health. However, few studies have further investigated the influence of human land use, which is an important factor affecting the habitats of insects, on the expansion of RIFAs. In addition, there is a lack of knowledge of the empirical associations between RIFA diffusion and land use within countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCyclists can be easily exposed to traffic-related pollutants due to riding on or close to the road during commuting in cities. PM has been identified as one of the major pollutants emitted by vehicles and associated with cardiopulmonary and respiratory diseases. As routing has been suggested to reduce the exposures for cyclists, in this study, PM was monitored with low-cost sensors during commuting periods to develop models for identifying low exposure routes in three Asian cities: Taipei, Osaka, and Seoul.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
June 2021
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic that was reported at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China, and was rapidly disseminated to all provinces in around one month. The study aims to assess the changes in intercity railway passenger transport on the early spatial transmission of COVID-19 in mainland China. Examining the role of railway transport properties in disease transmission could help quantify the spatial spillover effects of large-scale travel restriction interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRestricting human movement to decrease contact probability and frequency helps mitigate large-scale epidemics. Movement-based zoning can be implemented to delineate the boundaries for movement restrictions. Previous studies used network community detection methods, which capture cohesive within-region movements, to delineate containment zones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo quickly isolate suspected cases to control the epidemics, this study proposes a body temperature monitoring system with a thermography based on the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. The collected data are transmitted to a back-end platform via wireless communication. Using the analyzed data, the platform provides services, such as instant alerts for any anomalies, infectious disease outbreak prediction, and risk level assessment for a given area, and it will be a great help to epidemic prevention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe control strategies preventing subclinical transmission differed among countries. A stochastic transmission model was used to assess the potential effectiveness of control strategies at controlling the COVID-19 outbreak. Three strategies included lack of prevention of subclinical transmission (Strategy A), partial prevention using testing with different accuracy (Strategy B) and complete prevention by isolating all at-risk people (Strategy C, Taiwan policy).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDengue fever is a viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes. In recent decades, dengue fever has spread throughout the world. In 2014 and 2015, southern Taiwan experienced its most serious dengue outbreak in recent years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe rapid expansion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been observed in many parts of the world. Many newly reported cases of COVID-19 during early outbreak phases have been associated with travel history from an epidemic region (identified as imported cases). For those cases without travel history, the risk of wider spreads through community contact is even higher.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, dengue has been rapidly spreading and growing in the tropics and subtropics. Located in southern China, Hong Kong's subtropical monsoon climate may favour dengue vector populations and increase the chance of disease transmissions during the rainy summer season. An increase in local dengue incidence has been observed in Hong Kong ever since the first case in 2002, with an outbreak reaching historically high case numbers in 2018.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe basic reproductive number (R) is a fundamental measure used to quantify the transmission potential of an epidemic in public health practice. However, R cannot reflect the time-varying nature of an epidemic. A time-varying effective reproductive number R can provide more information because it tracks the subsequent evolution of transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
June 2019
Green spaces have benefits but may also increase the risk of allergic disease. This study examined the association between the first occurrence of asthma and greenness exposure in children and teenagers. We conducted a 1:1 matched case-control study matched by sex, age, and the first diagnosis year with 7040 eligible subjects from a systematic sampling cohort database in Taiwan from 2001 to 2013.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommuting network flows are generally asymmetrical, with commuting behaviors bi-directionally balanced between home and work locations, and with weekday commutes providing many opportunities for the spread of infectious diseases via direct and indirect physical contact. The authors use a Markov chain model and PageRank-like algorithm to construct a novel algorithm called EpiRank to measure infection risk in a spatially confined commuting network on Taiwan island. Data from the country's 2000 census were used to map epidemic risk distribution as a commuting network function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDengue is one of the most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne viral diseases in the world. An increase in the incidence of dengue is commonly thought to be a consequence of variability of weather conditions. Taiwan, which straddles the Tropic of Cancer, is an excellent place to study the relationship between weather conditions and dengue fever cases since the island forms an isolated geographic environment.
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