Meteorological conditions and Legionnaires? disease sporadic cases-a systematic review

A number of studies suggest that meteorological conditions are related to the risk of Legionnaires' disease (LD) but the findings are not consistent. A systematic review was conducted to investigate the association of weather with sporadic LD and highlight the key meteorological conditions related to this outcome. PubMed, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library and OpenGrey were searched on 26-27 March 2020 without date, language or location restrictions. Key words included legionellosis, legionnaires' disease, combined with meteorological condi-tions, weather, temperature, humidity, rain, ultraviolet rays, wind speed, etc. Studies were excluded if they did not examine the exposure of interest, the outcome of interest and their association or if they only reported LD outbreak cases. The study was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and it was registered in PROSPERO (#CRD42020168869). There were 811 articles, of which 17 were included in the review. The studies investigated different meteoro-logical variables and most of them examined the combined effect of several variables. The most commonly examined factors were precipitation and temperature, followed by relative humidity. The studies suggested that increased precipitation, temperature and relative humidity were positively associated with the incidence of LD. There was limited evidence that higher wind speed, pressure, visibility, UV radiation and longer sunshine duration were inversely linked with the occurrence of LD. A period of increased but not very high temperatures, followed by a period of increased precipitation, favour the occurrence of LD. Increased awareness of the asso-ciation of temperature and precipitation and LD occurrence among clinicians and public health professionals can improve differential diagnosis for cases of sporadic community-acquired pneumonia and at the same time contribute to improving LD surveillance.

Automated summary

Multiple studies have shown that meteorological conditions, including precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, pressure, visibility, UV radiation, and sunshine duration, are associated with the incidence of Legionnaires' disease (LD). Increased precipitation, temperature, and relative humidity have a positive correlation with LD incidence, while higher wind speed, pressure, visibility, UV radiation, and longer sunshine duration are inversely linked to LD occurrence. Understanding the association between weather conditions and LD can improve the diagnosis and surveillance of sporadic LD cases.