Assessment of environment-health vulnerability in typical plague foci in China
典型鼠疫疫源地环境-健康脆弱性评价

The pathogens, epidemiology, prevention and control of plague, a deadly infectious disease most harmful to human beings are all highly related to physical and human factors People still have not completely understood some facts concerning plague epidemic formation and its relationship with eco-environment Hence it is very important to study the geographical epidemic law of plague and distribution of plague natural foci, and analysis on their environment-health vulnerability for more effective control of its outbreaks and epidemics The assessment of environment-health vulnerability will present a synthesis analysis talking human health as the core This paper firstly presents the background of spatial distribution of plague and natural plague foci in whole China,and then studies the environment health vulnerability by taking a typical plague focus as a case Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, a typical dauricus plague focus, and one of the ten types of natural plague foci in China, was selected for study based on 13 natural and social indicators such as rat density, annual average rainfall, annual average temperature, forest coverage, meadow coverage, population etc For the purpose of analyzing the trend of environmental change and its impacts on plague prevalence, the threshold value of environment-health vulnerability was deduced through clustering analysis and matrix operation of 13 indexes, and 4 different types of environment-health vulnerability were divided according to the threshold value Corresponding to this, 4 types of environment-health vulnerable areas in the typical plague foci, such as very high vulnerable area, high vulnerable area, moderate vulnerable area and low vulnerable area were identified The characteristics of low vulnerable area mainly manifested higher forest coverage or high urbanization level where it was unsuitable for dauricus survival anymore Consequently, the risk of plague prevalence changed into very low possibility On the contrary, the original surroundings in the very high vulnerable area became deteriorating seriously, and it posed higher probability of plague prevalence These imply that rehabilitating environment status in plague foci is the essential way to improve the environment-health vulnerability and control plague prevalence effectively