Abstract
Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a rodent-borne disease caused mainly by two hantaviruses in China: Hantaan virus and Seoul virus. Environmental factors can significantly affect the risk of contracting hantavirus infections, primarily through their effects on rodent population dynamics and human-rodent contact. We aimed to clarify the environmental risk factors favoring rodent-to-human transmission to provide scientific evidence for developing effective HFRS prevention and control strategies. The 10-year (2006–2015) field surveillance data from the rodent hosts for hantavirus, the epidemiological and environmental data extracted from satellite images and meteorological stations, rodent-to-human transmission rates and impacts of the environment on rodent community composition were used to quantify the relationships among environmental factors, rodent species and HFRS occurrence. The study included 709 cases of HFRS. Rodent species in Chenzhou, a hantavirus hotspot, comprise mainly Rattus norvegicus, Mus musculus, R. flavipectus and some other species (R. losea and Microtus fortis calamorum). The rodent species played different roles across the various land types we examined, but all of them were associated with transmission risks. Some species were associated with HFRS occurrence risk in forest and water bodies. R. norvegicus and R. flavipectus were associated with risk of HFRS incidence in grassland, whereas M. musculus and R. flavipectus were associated with this risk in built-on land. The rodent community composition was also associated with environmental variability. The predictive risk models based on these significant factors were validated by a good-fit model, where: cultivated land was predicted to represent the highest risk for HFRS incidence, which accords with the statistics for HFRS cases in 2014–2015. The spatial heterogeneity of HFRS disease may be influenced by rodent community composition, which is associated with local environmental conditions. Therefore, future work should focus on preventing HFRS is moist, warm environments.
Highlights
Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a rodent-borne infectious disease caused mainly by two hantaviruses in China: Hantaan virus (HTNV) and Seoul virus (SEOV) [1]
With respect to the rodent community composition per year, M. musculus and R. norvegicus comprised most of the trapped rodents (Fig 4)
We argue that clarification of the associations among the environment, host population, and disease dynamics is of great importance to the prevention and control of many types of disease epidemics
Summary
Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a rodent-borne infectious disease caused mainly by two hantaviruses in China: Hantaan virus (HTNV) and Seoul virus (SEOV) [1]. From 2006 to 2015, more than 110,000 cases of HFRS were reported in China [7], making HFRS a critical public health issue in this country [8]. Hunan Province, which is located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in central China, is one of the areas in this country where HFRS is most highly endemic [9,10], with 6,237 cases of HFRS diagnosed during 2006–2015. SEOV and HTNV have both been reported in Hunan Province, with SEOV being the dominant strain [11,12]. The main hosts for SEOV are Rattus norvegicus [13], Rattus flavipectus, and Mus musculus [14], whereas Apodemus agrarius is the host for HTNV [15,16]
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