Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, mentioned a study that used Project Tycho data in a post on his blog about El Niño events and dengue epidemics. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, used data of 3.5 million cases of dengue in eight southeast Asian countries from the Project Tycho database to examine the relationship between dengue epidemics and El Niño weather events. Analysis of the data of dengue cases, which came from 271 provinces within the eight countries, showed dengue transmission in densely populated areas had signature disease transmission patterns due to how close people live to one another.
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Related Project Tycho Datasets
Cambodia - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Cambodia - Dengue without Warning Signs
Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) - Dengue
Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) - Dengue without Warning Signs
Malaysia - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Malaysia - Dengue without Warning Signs
Philippines - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Philippines - Dengue without Warning Signs
Singapore - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Singapore - Dengue without Warning Signs
Taiwan, Province of China - Dengue
Thailand - Dengue without Warning Signs
Viet Nam - Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever
Viet Nam - Dengue without Warning Signs
Abstract
Just as the severity of the winter flu fluctuates from year to year in the United States, dengue fever can rage through tropical and subtropical regions of the world during their annual rainy seasons, causing potentially life-threatening high fever, severe joint pain, and bleeding. Other years—for still unknown reasons—dengue fizzles out. While many nations monitor the incidence of dengue within their borders, their data arent always combined to track outbreaks across wider regions over longer times. Now, NIH-funded researchers and colleagues, reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have linked an intense dengue epidemic that struck eight Southeast Asian countries starting in mid-1997 to high temperatures driven by the strongest El Niño event in recent times.
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