The transmission of infectious diseases between domestic and wild animals is posing great challenges to public health [
1‐
3]. Among the numerous emerging infectious diseases, including zoonoses, human brucellosis is one of the most common zoonotic diseases. Although there has been a noticeable decrease in the incidence and prevalence of brucellosis in many countries due to their domestic animal brucellosis control or eradication programs, human brucellosis is a growing public health concern in China with the increasing number of reported cases and more widespread natural foci [
4]. In mainland China, human brucellosis was first reported in 1905, the incidence of human brucellosis in China was quite severe before the 1980s and declined later [
4,
5]. Comprehensive prevention and control measures have been gradually implemented in mainland China since 1950 [
5]. Nationwide reporting of human brucellosis was established during 1950–1963, during 1964–1976, vaccination for animals and humans was applied in the high-risk areas, and then during 1977–1988, a national brucellosis control program was administered with the introduction of clinical features, case definition, laboratory examination criteria, treatment options, and control measures; the vaccination of livestock was selected as the main control method. Since 1990, sentinel surveillance of the seroprevalence of brucellosis in humans and animals has been added to the national brucellosis control program [
6]. However, the incidence of human brucellosis has been increasing greatly since 1990, against the background that the incidence of animal brucellosis remained unchanged [
7]. Also, the geographic distribution of affected regions gradually expanded, from traditional pasturing areas to agricultural areas, from the north part to the south part [
4]. These kinds of variation could be attributed to various kinds of risk factors. The number of livestock increased significantly in the past decade to meet the growing demands for meat consumption in mainland China [
8], which would give rise to the increase of the total population of infected domestic animals, even with relatively low-level seroprevalence in livestock. Lack of quarantine or pasteurization in the livestock product supply also increased the risk of infections in non-occupational populations and urban settings [
9,
10].
Multiple publications have been dealing with the epidemiological characteristics and spatio-temporal distribution of human brucellosis [
11,
12], while the studies focusing on the forecasting models were limited. The epidemic of human brucellosis is associated with the variation features of periodicity and seasonality; the major part of cases can be seen during the peak period, while sporadic cases can be observed during the non-peak period. Early recognition of the epidemics may provide strong support for the prevention and control of human brucellosis. The short-term forecast can evaluate the prevention or control measures; meanwhile, it can adopt timely and effective countermeasures for the epidemic peak that may occur. Among the available prediction models, time series analysis [
13] was the most commonly adopted method, and some characteristics could be found from the annual data.
In the present study, the reported number of human brucellosis cases on a monthly basis in mainland China from 2007 to 2017 was collected and the short-term forecast was made with the seasonal-trend decomposition (STL) and exponential smoothing model.