Abstract
Climate change and extreme weather event impacted on disease occurrence. The extreme precipitation events would be one of the potential factors related to gastrointestinal illness. This study is to investigate the association with the extreme precipitation between the mortality and hospital care of gastrointestinal diseases. We collected the rainfall records from Taiwan Central Weather Bureau for three metropolitans - Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung (north to south) during 1980–2003. Regarding to the international code of disease, 9th edition, this study extracted the information of gastrointestinal diseases in ICD9 002–004, ICD9 009, ICD9 535, ICD9 555 and ICD9 558 separately for infectious gastrointestinal diseases and noninfectious gastritis. National Death Certificate Database from 1980 to 2003 constructed by Department of Health and Insurance Reimbursement Claims Database from 1996 to 2002 established by the National Health Insurance program were individually used to analyze the risk of mortality and hospital care in gastrointestinal diseases associated with the extreme precipitation event. The results showed the variation of rainfall amount in three metropolitans typically relied on season. In general, the most rainfall occurred in summer and less in winter, obviously in Taichung and Kaohsiung. The rainy days in Taichung was not many compared to other two metropolitans (Fig.1), however, the proportion of torrential rainfall in rainy days occurred more often than other two metropolitans (The definition of the torrential rainfall in this study is the accumulative amount of rainfall in one day is more than 100 mm) (Fig. 2). In contrast to the mortality of infectious gastrointestinal diseases is gently decreased in three metropolitans, the mortality of gastritis was mildly changed annually. By the stratum of age (0–14, 15–39, 40–64 and > 65 years), the mortality of infectious gastrointestinal diseases is decreased in recent years mainly contributed from the persons over sixty-five years old. Among these three metropolitans, the mortality and hospital care of gastrointestinal disease were obviously changed accompanied by extreme participation event (the amount of rainfall is higher than 95% accumulative rainfall level over the years) as shown in Fig. 3. These exploratory analyses show the locally climate change effects on the mortality and hospital care of gastrointestinal diseases, especially in extreme participation event. According to the findings, we should pay the notification in the disease occurrence related to extreme weather change.