Economic downturn results in tick-borne disease upsurge

Parasites & Vectors

Table 3 Significant socio-economic variables to predict the degree of change in tick-borne encephalitis cases in 2009 relative to the mean for 2004-08

Explanatory variables	factor 1 p-value	factor 2 p-value	AICc
Food expenditure 2005²	0.0013		0.078
Food expenditure 2005² + At-risk of poverty 2008	0.0194	0.1061	0.847
Food expenditure 2005² + Gini coefficient 2008	0.0322	0.1239	1.180
Food expenditure 2005² + In-work risk of poverty 2008	0.0131	0.1269	1.232
Food expenditure 2005² + Poverty gap 2008	0.0290	0.2465	2.577
Food expenditure 2005² + Ratio unemployment 2009/'08	0.0317	0.3138	3.026
Food expenditure 2005² + Unemployment rate in 2009	0.0249	0.9508	4.407
Gini coefficient 2008	0.0051		3.102
At-risk of poverty 2008	0.0075		3.960
Poverty gap 2008	0.0107		4.743
Ratio unemployment 2009/'08	0.0120		4.985
Ratio unemployment '09/'08 + In-work risk of poverty '08	0.0142	0.0162	1.432
In-work risk of poverty 2008	0.0138		5.295
Unemployment rate in 2009	0.0295		6.931
GDP 2009	0.0898		9.222
Unemployment rate in 2008	0.8496		12.733
Temperature PCA Euclidean distance	0.8897		12.754
Precipitation PCA Euclidean distance	0.9471		12.773

Factor 1 and factor 2 refer to the predictor variables in the multi-variate analyses. Significant p-values are shown in bold.
Only some results of the multivariate analyses are presented to illustrate that second variables made significant contributions to the explanatory power of the models in only one case.
²For food expenditure, the squared term was used because a non-linear (2^nd order polynomial) relationship with TBE increase is dominant.
In all cases, n = 13 (Switzerland omitted for lack of some data); df = 3 for uni-variate, 4 for bivariate models.

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