The Spatio-Temporal and Environmental Patterns of Tick-Borne Diseases Distribution in the Russian Far East

The international public health is facing a problem of rapid transformation of existing ranges of environmental diseases and emergence of new disease outbreaks. These outbreaks are stipulated by increasing population mobility, trade of animal- and plant-originated product, the environmental and climatic changes. • The article presents a medico-geographical approach to the study of some environmental tick-borne diseases at the regional and local level in the Russian Far East along the Sino-Russian border for a period 2000–2020. • A series of thematic maps for tick-borne encephalitis, tick-borne borrelioses and tick-borne rickettsiosis of North Asia were created, showing the incidence and dynamics of disease distribution. The methods based on data aggregation using a “space–time cube” concept were tested to identify the hot spots and trends, as well as the spatial differences in epidemic patterns of the aforesaid diseases in Russian territories: the Amur Oblast, the Khabarovsk Krai, the Zabaikalsky Krai and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. A logistic regression model was applied for testing a relation between the hot spots of a particular disease and a number of geographic factors, including the land cover type. • The preliminary analysis of sustainable ill-being for the studied diseases showed the predominant influence of the climatic and landscape factors, including the proportion of sparse forests and proportion of urbanized areas, which, however, requires some further research.