Assessment of environmental factors associated with rural endemics of Leptospirosis in Guilan Province, Iran

چکیده مقاله

Leptospirosis is a globally emerging zoonotic disease depending on environmental conditions with social and economic burdens on rural areas. Regarding to worldwide prevalence, animals and humans who are in contact with contaminated water or soil especially at temperate and tropical regions with high rainfall and floods are the most significant targets of this disease. Major hosts of infection are wild and domestic animals that hold pathogenic leptospires. Exposure of humans to the urine of infected animals directly or indirectly is the main way of transmission occurrence. Due to suitable conditions, leptospirosis is endemic in north of Iran (Caspian Region) include Mazandaran, Golestan and especially Guilan provinces. Guilan included a lot of paddy fields and farmers and had the most reported cases among all provinces during 2009-2011. In this study, we are going to assess the influence of 9 environmental parameters on leptospirosis occurrence throughout 109 rural districts of Guilan during three years. For this purpose, spatial statistics approaches such as Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) were utilized to investigate correlation between number of disease cases and environmental factors. However, assessment results showed better success of GWR versus OLS as regressions were performed. Finally, due to the economic and health burdens of leptospirosis on rural areas, understanding of effective parameters and their influences are so helpful for decision makers and privacy policies in prevention planning.

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