Study on prevalence and disease burden of infectious diarrhea in Guangxi

Objective To reveal the prevalence and disease burden of infectious diarrhea in Guangxi.Methods Home visits were carried out in more than 20,000 residents living in communities or villages selected by method of random cluster sampling in August and December of 2007 in Guangxi.With the data computerized,incidencerates,DALYs and disease burden were calculated.Results Two week incidence rate was 1.04% and casefatality rate was 0.00%.The two-week incidence rate was higher in summer(1.21%)than that in winter(0.89%,χ²=10.0578,P=0.0015).The estimated incidence rate was 0.2887 episode per person-year,with the highest rate found in children younger than 5 years of age.Of those,incidencerate of 1.4428 episode per person-year was observed in children at age group 0-4.9.The incidence rate was 0.3091 episodes per person-year in the male and 0.2673 episode per person-year in the female.The frequency of seeking medical consultation was 28.05% and of hospitalization was 2.04%.37.10% of patients bought drugs by them selves;13.8% took self-medication at home and 21.04% took notreatment as they had diarrhea.The general DALYs was 0.1935 per thousand person-year,with the highest of 0.2971 per thousand person-year in youth and midlife at age group 20-49.The direct and indirect economic loss(GDP)per capita were 43.02 Yuan and 18.35 Yuan,respectively.And the general economic loss per capita was measured as 61.37 Yuan.It is estimated that the economic loss caused by diarrhea was 87896.61 million Yuan in Guagnxi.Conclusion Decreasing prevalence of diarrhea has been observed in Guangxi compared with that in previous years.Children under 5 years of age is the population at high risk of the disease.It is common that patients do not seek medical consultation when they suffer from diarrhea,which still causes some disease burden.