[Study on the association between temperature and the risk of injuries by animals in Guangdong Province]

Objective: To assess the association between temperature and risk of animal injury, and identifying vulnerable populations. Methods: Based on a time-stratified case-crossover design, the number of animal injuries monitored in hospitals of Guangdong Provincial Injury Surveillance System in 2011 and 2015-2016 was included, and the daily meteorological data were derived from the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis-Land, which was produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Conditional logistic regression combined with a distributed lagged nonlinear model was applied to analyze the association of temperature and animal-specific injuries. We also conducted stratified analysis by region, sex, age, occupation, and location of injury occurrence. Results: There was an almost linear relationship between temperature and the occurrence of animal injury. The excess risk (ER) of animal injury was 2.65% (95%CI: 2.27%-3.04%) for a 1 ℃ rise in temperature with much higher risk of occurrence (ER=9.34%, 95%CI: 7.57%-11.13%) for non-mammalian injury than that for mammalian injuries (ER=2.30%, 95%CI: 1.90%-2.70%). Stratified analysis revealed that the occurrence of animal injury was more susceptible to temperature influences in urban (ER=2.78%, 95%CI: 2.35%-3.21%), female (ER=2.71%, 95%CI: 2.16%-3.27%), the elderly aged 60 years and above (ER=3.05%, 95%CI: 1.65%- 4.47%), farmer (ER=4.66%, 95%CI: 3.03%-6.32%) and agricultural area (ER=10.63%, 95%CI: 7.57%-13.79%) than their correspondents. In terms of mammalian injury, dog bites showed the highest risk (ER=2.71%, 95%CI: 2.12%-3.30%). In terms of non-mammalian,snake injuries were highly influenced by temperature (ER=16.74%, 95%CI: 11.33%-22.40%). Conclusions: The ambient temperature rises could increase the risk of animal injury with much higher risk for non-mammalian than that for mammalian injuries. Our findings suggest that global warming may increase the risk and disease burden from animal injuries.