A Study on Spatial Distribution of Enterovirus Cases in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Kuo,Shih-Feng, 郭士鳯
• Other Authors: Hsieh, Yi-Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25774959779311983632

碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 地學研究所 === 97 === In the spring of 1998, the most serious epidemic of Enterovirus 71 (EV71) broke out in Taiwan and spread rapidly throughout the whole of the island. It claimed a number of precious lives of young babies, and caused a nation-wide panic, at a huge expense of social costs and resources. Therefore, how to effectively and precisely understand the spatial distribution of cases has become a significant work facing the related government sections. In the past 20 years, due to the rapid improvement of GIS（Geographic Information System）and its applications in medical geography, public health, and epidemiology, the analyzing function has been expanded from simply visual analysis, to the analyzes of exploration and modeling. In this study, GIS was employed to draw the dot maps pertaining to Enterovirus 71 and other Enterovirus infections for 1999 to 2005 respectively. The findings of the analyzes were：（1）The majority of the cases clustered in the metropolitan areas, probably because of their higher population density and higher school enrollment of the kids；（2）as long as the more serious epidemic cases were concerned, the relatively higher values of risk, after exclusion of extreme values, were more obvious in the suburban areas；and（3）the higher values of risk had a trend of moving north-ward in the past decade. In order to investigate if there was a significant difference in spatial clusters of Enterovirus risk, the technique of “global spatial autocorrelation” was used to test and analyze the data. The results showed that the hot spots of the the cases of Enterovirus generally shifted north-ward from south Taiwan, such as Taiwan area, to central Taiwan, namely, Taichung and Changhua areas. More interesting thing is that the hot spots of the cases of Enterovirus 71 had moved to further north than that of other Enterovirus.