An epidemiological analysis of the Beijing 2008 Hand-Foot-Mouth epidemic

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the epidemiological data concerning the 18445 HFMD-infected cases in Beijing in 2008.The main findings are as follows.(i) Seasonal variations in incidence were observed,with a peak observed during the summer season,especially in May.Male patients outnumber female patients by 1.57:1.(ii) Most cases occurred in children 4 years old or younger.Outperforming Weibull distribution and Gamma distribution as to model fitness when analyzing patient ages,log-normal distrib...