Temporal and spatial associations between meteorological parameters, water quality and enteric infections in South India.

摘要

In this thesis, the relationship between meteorological parameters, water quality and diarrheal disease is explored. Seasonality assessment showed that the physicochemical water quality parameters exhibit strong seasonality in both the public and private domains and the source and household measurements taken on the same day are highly correlated. Seasonality was not detected for bacteria concentrations. In the spatiotemporal context, the results of this study agree with the existing literature that holds that fecal coliforms tend to increase at the household level if the source water is relatively clean and vice versa. The direction and magnitude of the change in bacteria concentrations between the two domains is a potential risk indicator for diarrheal disease. In terms of the relationship between water quality and disease outcome, risk ratio, logistic, Poisson and mixed effect models yielded different relationships, which suggests re-consideration of the epidemiological and statistical approaches taken in the future aimed at exploring these relationships.