Incident characteristics of public health emergencies in Anhui province, 2010 – 2018

  Objective  To describe incident characteristics of public health emergencies (PHE) in Anhui province for providing evidences to improvements in PHE prevention and control strategies.

  Methods  The cleared data on PHE in Anhui province from January 1st, 2010 to December 31st, 2018 were extracted from National Information System for Disease Control and Prevention and the incident characteristics of the registered PHE was analyzed.

  Results  Totally 331 PHE were reported during the period in the province, of which, 281 and 49 were classified as minor and moderate events and only one was categorized as a major emergency. The PHE involved 10 774 disease cases and resulted in 107 deaths. For all the PHE and disease cases, 62.8% and 72.6% were contributed to infectious disease epidemics and 74.8% of all the deaths were contributed to poisonings. Among all the PHE contributed to infectious disease epidemics, 55.8% were caused by respiratory infectious diseases and 69.3% of the all poisoning-related PHE were food poisonings. The PHE reported in every month of a year from 2010 to 2018 but more PHE contributed to infectious disease epidemics were reported during March – June and October – December and more PHE contributed to poisoning were reported during July – September in a year. The reported PHE occurred in all the 16 municipalities/prefectures but 49.6% of the PHE occurred in 3 of the 16 municipalities/prefectures of the province. More than one half (51.1%) of the reported PHE and one-third (70.0%) of PHE-related disease cases, but only 0.9% of the PHE-related deaths occurred in schools or childcare facilities; for all the PHE occurred in schools or childcare facilities, 91.1% were caused by infectious disease epidemics.

  Conclusion  Public health emergencies were mainly caused by infectious disease epidemics but the majority of public health emergency-related deaths were due to poisoning, and schools and childcare facilities were the sites at a higher risk of public health emergency incidence in Anhui province during years from 2010 to 2018.