BACKGROUND Major outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) have been reported in China since 2008, posing a great threat to the health of children. Although many studies have examined the effect of meteorological variables on the incidence of HFMD, the results have been inconsistent. This study aimed to quantify the relationship between meteorological factors and HFMD occurrence in diffe...

OBJECTIVE To review the scientific evidence about the impact of climate change and socio-environmental factors on dengue transmission, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. METHODS Search of the published literature on PubMed, ISI web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. Articles were included if an association between climate or socio-environmental factors and dengue transmission was assessed...

Climate change poses multiple risks to the population of Lima, the largest city and capital of Peru, located on the Pacific coast in a desert ecosystem. These risks include increased water scarcity, increased heat, and the introduction and emergence of vector-borne and other climate sensitive diseases. To respond to these threats, it is necessary for the government, at every level, to adopt mor...

Topics covered: 1. Conceptual framework – agents of pattern formation. 2. Abiotic factors – geology, geomorphology, hydrology, soils. 3. Climatic factors – temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, meteorology. 4. Climate-landform effects on vegetation pattern, ecological flows, disturbance regimes and geomorphological processes. 5. Resource management implications – climate change scenarios...

We report a statistical mixed model for assessing the importance of climate and non-climate drivers of interannual variability in dengue fever in southern coastal Ecuador. Local climate data and Pacific sea surface temperatures (Oceanic Niño Index [ONI]) were used to predict dengue standardized morbidity ratios (SMRs; 1995-2010). Unobserved confounding factors were accounted for using non-struc...

Scales in treeline research depend on the objectives and must match the underlying natural processes. Factors and processes at one scale may not be as important at another scale. In the global view, the number of factors influencing climatic treeline position can be reduced to the effects of heat deficiency. Emphasis, however, should be laid on differentiation of the treeline by their regionall...

background : health professionals face the adverse health effects of climate change and air pollution in their practices. this review underscores the effects of these environmental factors on maternal and children’s health, as the most vulnerable groups to climate change and air pollution. methods : we reviewed electronic databases for a search of the literature to find relevant studies publish...

Time-varying fire-climate relationships may represent an important component of fire-regime variability, relevant for understanding the controls of fire and projecting fire activity under global-change scenarios. We used time-varying statistical models to evaluate if and how fire-climate relationships varied from 1902-2008, in one of the most flammable forested regions of the western U.S.A. Fir...