Epidemiological features of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Beijing urban and suburb areas in 2003 / 生物医学与环境科学（英文）

ABSTRACT

<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To describe the epidemiologic features of an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in urban and suburb areas in Beijing and to explore their differences between these two areas.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>Data of SARS cases were collected from daily notification of China Ministry of Health and a database of infectious diseases was established by the Beijing Municipal Center for Disease Prevention and Control (BCDC). All the data were put into dataset files by Microsoft Excel-2000 and analyzed with SPSS version 10.0 software.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>The respective urban incidence and mortality rate were 29.06 and 2.21 per 100,000, while the case fatality rate was 7.62%. In contrast, the respective suburb incidence and mortality rate were 10.61 and 0.78 per 100,000, and the case fatality rate was 7.32%. No significant differences were found in demographic characteristics between the urban and suburb areas.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>Beijing urban area suffered a more serious SARS epidemic than the suburb area in 2003.</p>