Environmental determinants of infectious disease incidence: A discrete time series analysis in Bangladesh

Weather is an important determinant for human health. There is an apparent increase in outbreak of many infectious diseases which reflects the combined impacts of rapid demographic, environmental, social, technological and other changes in our way-of-living. This study aimed to analyze the effects of environmental factors on infectious disease occurrences in Bangladesh using time series data from 2013 to 2022. Environmental data (monthly average temperature, monthly average relative humidity and monthly average rainfall) were collected from the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) and disease data (Tetanus, HIV and Chickenpox counts) were obtained from the Infectious Disease Hospital in Dhaka. Utilizing Poisson and Negative Binomial (NB) Generalized Linear Models (GLMs), the impact of weather variability on disease transmission was examined. The best-fitted models yielded AIC values of 682.7 for Tetanus, 605.96 for HIV and 608.01 for Chickenpox, with corresponding RMSE values of 3.33, 0.22 and 1.67. The study found that monthly average rainfall negatively affects Tetanus counts while temperature and humidity had significant positive and negative effects on Chickenpox counts respectively. No significant effect of environmental factors on HIV counts was observed. These findings can inform preventative measures and strategies to reduce disease impact.