Paper Reviewed
Liu, Y., Guo, Y., Wang, C., Li, W., Lu,J., Shen, S., Xia, H., He, J., and Oiu, X. 2015. Association between temperature change and outpatient visits for respiratory tract infections amoung chidlren in Guangzhou, China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health12 :439-454.

Writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Liu et al. (2015) describe how they examined the association between temperature change and clinical visits for childhood respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in Guangzhou, China, based on outpatient records of clinical visits for pediatric RTIs that occured from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2013, where temperature change was defined as the difference between the mean temperatures of two consecutive days, and where a distributed lag non-linear model was employed to examine the impact of the observed temperature changes.

The nine Chinese researchers report that their analyses of the weather and hospital data revealed that "a large temperature decrease was associated with a significant risk for an RTI, with the effect lasting for ~10 days" (see figure below). In addition they found that "children aged 0-2 years, and especially those aged <1 year, were particularly vulnerable to the effects of temperature drop, nothing that an extreme temperature decrease "was significantly associated with increased pediatric outpatient visits for RTI's in Guangzhou."

Figure 1. The relative risk of childhood respiratory tract infections by temperature change (1st, 5th, 95th, and 99th percentiles) at specific lag periods (0, 5, 10, and 20 days), clearly showing the negative effect of cold spells and the beneficial impact of heat waves. The temperature effect begins to decline after 5 days and is non-existant after 20 days.

Thus, we find yet another example of the clearly-elucidated fact that periodic cold spells around the globe are much more dangerous to the well-being of the world's inhabitants -- and especially it's children -- than are the periodic heat waves that are hyped by the world's climate alarmists. And for much more on this subject, we suggest you see the many Journal Reviews archived in our website's Subject Index under the general heading of Health Effects (Temperature- Hot vs Cold Weather) for various places around the world.