Spatial-temporal analysis of emergency response capability of the “Shandong vaccine event”

Abstract

Emergent public health events have a wide range of effect and serious harm to public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is an important institution of disease prevention and control and public health management and technical services in China. Its ability of responding to public health emergency will directly affect the effectiveness of emergency handling and a timely reaction can provide useful information for the public at the first time and reduce the panic caused by this incident to the largest extent. Therefore, it’s important to scientifically evaluate the capability of CDC to deal with the public health emergencies. In this study, we took the “Shandong vaccine event” outbreak in March 18, 2016 as an example, collected the relevant information published on the CDC website and used the temporal-spatial analysis to evaluate the capability of CDC in China to deal with the public health emergencies. The data was from the CDC official website of each city which responded to this event. It shows that 73.2% of the total cities has established a CDC official website, of which 69% of the cities have responses. This analysis included the visualization analysis of the speed and the contents of responses and the spatial clustering analysis, using the spatial scan statistics method to detect the spatial cluster of the responded city. The results of this analysis showed that the spatial distribution of the information construction of CDC in China is inequality. Compared with the other regions of China, the CDC department’s official websites of cities in southwestern region responded faster on public health emergency, and has a significant spatial clustering in this area. The CDC department of Shandong and Henan provinces which was the huge circulation province of the failing vaccine and the high-risk areas in this vaccine incident, didn’t have a timely reaction and the capability of response to the public health emergency is weak.

Keywords:

public health emergency; CDC; emergency response; spatial clustering; spatial-temporal analysis