International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health
Specific risk factors for contracting Q fever: Lessons from the outbreak Jena
Section snippets
Methods
We performed a cross-sectional study of demographic and behavioural factors associated with Q fever disease. We investigated a section of the affected area for 100% sampling. This particular area contained rows of remarkably similar buildings all with balconies facing the source area at approximately the same angle (Fig. 1). All registered occupants (n = 875) were mailed a participation request and given the dates. The in-home interviews were conducted by trained interviewers (students) using a
Results
The registration office Jena provided data from 867 occupants. Of these, 608 were at home. 460 (75.7%) participated in the study and 148 refused participation.
In total we detected 101 cases among the 460 participants. Of these 101 cases 44 fulfilled our criteria of fever combined with symptoms without performance of an antibody testing. Seven tested positive for C. burnetii specific antibodies corresponding to a recent infection without symptoms and 50 fell in both categories, clinical symptoms
Discussion
Our study describes risk factors for getting Q fever in an urban outbreak under typical summer weather conditions. The mean air temperature was with 17.2 °C (0.5 K, min. 5.1 °C, max. 32.2 °C) in the normal range. But there was a dry period of 5 days at the end of lambing. Most of significant outbreaks are preceded by a period of dry weather like in our situation (Lyytikainen et al., 1997, Karagiannis et al., 2009). Furthermore outbreaks are often attributed to windborne spread, frequently during
Funding
This work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany (Grant 01 KI 0735 and 01 KI 1001C).
Acknowledgment
We thank Ivonne Riethmüller for her significant contribution to the field work.
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