Climate influence on Diarrhea Disease in Tropical Regions based on Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Diarrhea disease presents a significant public health concern due to its impact on mortality, and research showed that climate plays an important role on diarrhea prevalence. However, effect of climate on diarrhea incidence was inconsistent among climate factors. Here, we investigated this inconsistency thorough systematic literature review. Our review encompassed the formulation of research questions, development of literature search strategies, and the establishment of inclusion/exclusion criteria for systematic data extraction. We carried out an extensive search from peer-review literature databases including Scopus, Pubmed, and Proquest for articles published between January 2000 to March 2023. We found that 74 studies focusing on diarrhea diseases and climate influencing factors met our inclusive criteria. Climate factors that affected diarrhea were rainfall, temperature, humidity, and climate seasonality. Our findings revealed that a positive association between diarrhea and rainfall was consistently observed. Other climate factors (temperature and humidity) indicated a positive correlation as well, although viral diarrhea exhibited a negative correlation with temperature. Further, bacterial and parasitic diarrhea diseases were more prevalent in the rainy season, whereas viral diarrhea occurred more frequently during the dry season with lower temperatures.