Spatiotemporal analysis of invasive meningococcal disease, Germany.

Johannes Elias, Dag Harmsen, Heike Claus, Wiebke Hellenbrand, Matthias Frosch, Ulrich Vogel

University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Journal Article: Emerging infectious diseases (impact factor: 6.79). 11/2006; 12(11):1689-95.

Abstract

Meningococci can cause clusters of disease. Specimens from 1,616 patients in Germany obtained over 42 months were typed by serogrouping and sequence typing of PorA and FetA and yielded a highly diverse dataset (Simpson's index 0.963). A retrospective spatiotemporal scan statistic (SaTScan) was applied in an automated fashion to identify clusters for each finetype defined by serogroup variable region (VR) VR1 and VR2 of the PorA and VR of the FetA. A total of 26 significant clusters (p< or =0.05) were detected. On average, a cluster consisted of 2.6 patients. The median population in the geographic area of a cluster was 475,011, the median cluster duration was 4.0 days, and the proportion of cases in spatiotemporal clusters was 4.2%. The study exemplifies how the combination of molecular finetyping and spatiotemporal analysis can be used to assess an infectious disease in a large European country.

Source: PubMed

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Keywords

26 significant clusters
 
42 months
 
clusters
 
diverse dataset
 
finetype
 
infectious disease
 
large European country
 
median cluster duration
 
median population
 
Meningococci
 
molecular finetyping
 
retrospective spatiotemporal scan statistic
 
SaTScan
 
sequence typing
 
spatiotemporal clusters
 
Specimens