Page 64 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS1944 Oyelola A.
mortality caused by pneumococcal pneumonia (55.4%) is the highest among
LRIs [21]. In Australia, pneumonia accounted for an estimated 1.5% of all
overnight hospital admission in 2012-2013 [2]. In this study, we quantified the
lagged-pneumonia and exposure-pneumonia associations due to
temperature and rainfall in wet-dry tropics of Australia. The burden of the
disease attributable to the two weather variables was also estimated. Some
countries have reported increases pattern of infectious disease among
minorities [22], among children [23, 24] and older age group [25] which is
consistent with our study.
This study has several strengths. To our knowledge this is the first study to
estimate the burden of pneumonia attributable to weather in Australia. The
use of DLNMs to explore attributable risk among vulnerable groups, give more
insight into varying prolong exposure to weather in the community which will
be useful in discussion-making. The two major limitations were noted in this
study. First, the choice of lag-exposure use to investigate the delayed effect of
weather variables was based on model selection criteria for better fit and not
scientific justification. Second, few smooth functions were explored to capture
the exposure-lag-response relationships. These smoothing methods are
difficult to validate in DLNM [16]. Several lags up to 15 weeks (although, we
did not extend the lags beyond 15 weeks) and functional relationships for
exposure-lag-response were assessed by QAIC.

References
1. Hoy, W.E., Australian burden of disease study: impact and causes of illness
and death in Australia 2011. 2016.
2. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australian hospital statistics
2012–13, in Health services series. 2014, AIHW: Canberra.
3. Green, R.S., et al., The effect of temperature on hospital admissions in nine
California counties. International journal of public health, 2010. 55(2): p.
113-121.
4. Song, G., et al., Diurnal temperature range as a novel risk factor for COPD
death. Respirology, 2008. 13(7): p. 1066-1069.
5. Xu, Z., et al., Impact of temperature on childhood pneumonia estimated
from satellite remote sensing. Environmental research, 2014. 132: p. 334-
341.
6. Xu, Z., W. Hu, and S. Tong, Temperature variability and childhood
pneumonia: an ecological study. Environmental Health, 2014. 13(1): p. 51.
7. Chan, P., et al., Seasonal variation in respiratory syncytial virus chest
infection in the tropics. Pediatric pulmonology, 2002. 34(1): p. 47-51.
8. Paynter, S., et al., Sunshine, rainfall, humidity and child pneumonia in the
tropics: time-series analyses. Epidemiology & Infection, 2013. 141(6): p.
1328-1336.

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