Research on the environmental impact factors of Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease in Shenzhen, China using RS and GIS technologies

The outbreak of Hand-Foot-Mouth Disease (HFMD) has brought a serious threat to people´s health. There is no research considering both the natural and social environment to study the outbreak and propagation of HFMD quantitatively by now. In this study, we acquired environmental impact factors of HFMD using remote sensing and GIS. Then we analyzed the relationship between density of HFMD cases and environmental impact factors for year 2009 in Shenzhen. It was found that density of HFMD cases was significantly associated with population density, hospital density, road density, annual average of aerosol optical depth, and annual average of normalized difference vegetation index. A linear regression model was constructed with the R² value of 0.677 using environmental impact factors, and both hospital density and annual average of aerosol optical depth were included in the model.