An Association between Rainy Days with Clinical Dengue Fever in Dhaka, Bangladesh: Findings from a Hospital Based Study
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Sharker, Yushuf
Rumi, Reza Ali
Khan, Mahboob-Ul Islam
Shomik, Mohammad Sohel
Rahman, Muhammad Waliur
Billah, Sk Masum
Rahman, Mahmudur
Streatfield, Peter Kim
Harley, David
Luby, Stephen P
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Background: Dengue, a febrile illness, is caused by a Flavivirus transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. Climate influences the ecology of the vectors. We aimed to identify the influence of climatic variability on the occurrence of clinical dengue requiring hospitalization in Zone-5, a high incidence area of Dhaka City Corporation (DCC), Bangladesh. Methods and Findings: We retrospectively identified clinical dengue cases hospitalized from Zone-5 of DCC between 2005 and 2009. We extracted records of the four major catchment hospitals of the study area. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) provided data on temperature, rainfall, and humidity of DCC for the study period. We used autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models for the number of monthly dengue hospitalizations. We also modeled all the climatic variables using Poisson regression. During our study period, dengue occurred throughout the year in Zone-5 of DCC. The median number of hospitalized dengue cases was 9 per month. Dengue incidence increased sharply from June, and reached its peak in August. One additional rainy day per month increased dengue cases in the succeeding month by 6% (RR = 1.06, 95% CI: 1.04–1.09). Conclusions: Dengue is transmitted throughout the year in Zone-5 of DCC, with seasonal variation in incidence. The number of rainy days per month is significantly associated with dengue incidence in the subsequent month. Our study suggests the initiation of campaigns in DCC for controlling dengue and other Aedes mosquito borne diseases, including Chikunguniya from the month of May each year. BMD rainfall data may be used to determine campaign timing.
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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
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17
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24
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© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Epidemiology
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
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Rahman, KM; Sharker, Y; Rumi, RA; Khan, M-UI; Shomik, MS; Rahman, MW; Billah, SM; Rahman, M; Streatfield, PK; Harley, D; Luby, SP, An Association between Rainy Days with Clinical Dengue Fever in Dhaka, Bangladesh: Findings from a Hospital Based Study, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020, 17 (24), pp. 9506