The effect of weather on common cold: People of all ages are affected by the common cold, children, the elderly are the most susceptible. Common cold are caused by viruses, weather is an indirect cause of the cold as well. We investigated the impact of meteorological factors on daily outpatients for common cold with medical insurance in Shanghai during 2008-2010 using Generalized Additive Model (GAM). Natural cubic spline smoothing function was used to control the seasonality and the long-term trend, and the dummy variables were used to adjust weekday, holidays and medical insurance policy effects. We found a non-linear negative relationship between cold outpatients and temperature, and a linear positive relationship between cold outpatients and relative humidity. Cold outpatients increase as the temperature decrease at all age groups, however, adults were more resilient to low temperature, e.g. children (ages: 0-14) were prone to catch colds at 10.9℃ while adults (ages: 15-64) and the old (ages: 65+) were more sensitive at 6.5℃ to 6.8℃. Interestingly, adult outpatients for cold increased in the summer season, the reason may be the lower temperature in the office and public traffic facilities caused by central air condition.
Health forecast service: Shanghai Meteorological Service has developed cold forecast product based on the scientific research results to help people take care of their health. Cold risk forecast and relevant prevention measures has be given to some kindergartens, community hospitals and voluntary participants in Shanghai through mobile phone message, email, post and brochure, when the poor weather conditions are forecast. The community hospitals and kindergartens taking part in the service will display cold forecast messages on electric screens and on their websites, it can help patients and students' parents to mitigate cold risks by avoiding or decreasing expecting exposure to deteriorated weather.
Evaluation of health forecast: An intervention study of health forecast evaluation was conducted in 10 kindergartens in Shanghai for a year, the aim of the intervention trial was to assess the effect of the service and its ability to prevent cold. More than 800 children in five kindergartens were randomly assigned into the intervention group, and the approximate number of children in another five kindergartens were assigned into the control group without cold forecasting service. Parents and teachers in the intervened kindergartens were informed by sending cold risk forecast and relevant prevention measures through mobile phone message and email. At the same time, an education corner in each class was set, where lovely weather symbols and popular cartoon characters symbolizing alert levels were used. Seminars were also held to help them better understand the forecast service. At the beginning of the intervention study, a baseline questionnaire was surveyed which include age, gender, height, weight, family general status, medical history and children's quality of life. In the process of research, kindergarten teachers in both groups were asked to record sickness absence of children from school caused by cold, it can help us evaluate the effect of the service objectively. After a year of service, a satisfaction questionnaire was surveyed to measure parents' satisfaction with cold forecast service. Over the half of the respondents considered cold forecast accurate and may reduce the family health care costs, 65% of the respondents satisfied with the cold forecast service. Average number of cold attack for Children in Intervention group was 10% lower than that in the control group, the results of evaluation showed that cold forecast has a positive effect on public health.
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