Background
Echinococcosis is a chronic parasitic infection of humans, domestic animals, and wildlife as a neglected parasitic disease [
1], which gives precedent support for its elimination and control [
2]. Treatment of human echinococcosis requires significant expenditure for the families of patients and countries [
3]. Echinococcosis is usually expensive and causes a heavy financial burden on sick families [
4]. Above 90% of the global burden of alveolar echinococcosis (AE) [
5] and 34% of cystic echinococcosis (CE) are in China [
6]. Currently, treatments in public hospitals in China are financed through three sources: government subsidies, patient fees, and drug markups. As poverty and infectious diseases reinforce each other, the Chinese government has committed to fighting and eliminating poverty-impoverished areas and has promoted health literacy for echinococcosis according to Healthy China 2030 [
7]. The prevalence of human echinococcosis (HE) was positively related to the ethic ratio but negatively related to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) [
8]. Due to the high disease burden still shown in spite of national programme, appropriate policies and actions are demanded [
3]. Echinococcosis is mostly distributed in endemic pastoral and semi-pastoral and poverty-stricken counties but few in non-endemic areas [
6]. Health authorities are demanded to supply only an annual summary of endemic data. However, the risk to people non-endemic is increasing with climate, landscape, and lifestyle changes [
4]. In the meantime, most endemic counties of echinococcosis are well-known tourist areas that receive thousands of visitors (local and outside) involved in ecotourism [
9]. With ecotourism blooming [
9], travelers are increasingly exposed to CE and AE by accidentally ingesting
Echinococcus eggs in contaminated food, water, or soil [
10].
Echinococcosis occurrence is highly dependent climatic factors including temperature and humidity [
11‐
13] due to their influences on the survival of eggs and environment factors such as landscape factors (land use, grassland area ratio, vegetation coverage, land cover changes) [
8]. Domestic dogs are the most important definitive host of both
E. granulosus and E. multilocularis with the highest risk of transmitting CE and AE to humans due to their ability to wander freely in pastoral areas and prey on slaughtered live-stock. Landscape of the world has been altered, and novel environments have infiltrated [
7,
10]. Due to anthropogenic land use, lifestyle changes, and even microclimate changes, afforestation [
14], particularly farming and fencing practices are linked to the distribution and dynamics of
Echinococcus spp. intermediate hosts [
15]. Hence, study demands to be applied to better understand the ecological processes that may result in variations in the transmission patterns of
Echinococcus spp. based on shifting environmental factors [
16].
Environmental niche models (ENMs) are powerful tools that can enhance the insight of the potential and actual distribution of species in question, as well as the way in which environmental factors may influence a species [
17]. Furthermore, these models can be applied to forecast the influences of motivations of global environmental change, such as climatic or landcover alterations on the distribution of parasites [
16,
18]. Hence, integrating information about pure and projected environmental variations might allow us to prioritize inspecting activities to exploit the possibility of expecting the advent of pathogens, specifical mediators of endemic, emergent, and re-emergent zoonotic diseases in novel areas [
18] .
Gansu Province is a co-endemic AE and CE areas with various environmental conditions belonging to the most impoverished region in China [
19]. The temperature and precipitation in Gansu Province decrease from southeast to northwest, and the Hexi areas show an upward trend in annual precipitation [
20]. There were 56 out of 368 Chinese endemic echinococcosis counties but uneven distributed in 81 counties and districts in Gansu Province [
21]. Consequently, most investigations currently focus on endemic echinococcosis counties [
21,
22]. However, some HE cases have been reported in Lanzhou City [
23,
24]. Hence, it is very key to increase urban citizens and tourists’ awareness of risky practices that transmit the disease [
25]. To our knowledge, no scientific studies have been conducted to analyze the health care expenditure on inpatient treatment and examined the financial inequalities relating to different levels of gross domestic product, determine their impacts [
26] of climate and environmental changes on the shift in the distributional range of
Echinococcus spp. in Gansu Province.
Here, we modeled the spatiotemporal dynamic distribution of Echinococcus spp. in Gansu Province from 2000 to 2020 by collecting echinococcosis scientific literature and hospital records, specifically quantifying impatient case characteristics. We aimed to address the following research questions: (1) describe patients’ characteristics related to echinococcosis at a province level to get a better picture of the current epidemiological scenario after the implementation of regional control programs, (2) estimate dynamics of Echinococcus spp. impact in terms of monetary losses including animal production losses and hospitalization expenditure in Gansu Province, (3) estimate the current spatial distribution of suitable conditions for the Echinococcus spp. in Gansu Province, (4) evaluate the potential influence of climatic change on the distribution of suitable conditions Echinococcus spp in the future (2070).
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