Figure 1.
TBE-positive and TBE-negative provinces in northern Italy.
(AL = Alessandria; AO = Aosta; BG = Bergamo; BL = Belluno; BS = Brescia; BZ = Bolzano; CN = Cuneo; GO = Gorizia; NO = Novara; PN = Pordenone; TN = Trento; TO = Torino; TV = Treviso; UD = Udine; VA = Varese; VI = Vicenza; VR = Verona).
Table 1.
Position and classification of meteorological stations from which data were obtained for this study.
Table 2.
Clinical statistics from the TBE-positive provinces of northern Italy (see also Fig. 1).
Figure 2.
Mean annual TBE incidence (number of cases/100 000 inhabitants) and annual TBE confirmed human cases in the TBE-positive provinces.
Figure 3.
TBE human cases aggregated per age class.
Figure 4.
Annual total precipitation (top), annual minimum (middle) and maximum (bottom) daily air temperature in the TBE-negative provinces (panels A) and TBE-positive provinces (panels B) in northern Italy from 1950 to 2006 (see also Fig. 1).
Table 3.
Linear regression slopes of the temporal trends for annual climatic variables using the occurrence of human TBE cases as the covariate (see also Fig. 4).
Figure 5.
Total coppices and high forest surface coverage recorded in TBE-negative provinces (panel A) and TBE-positive provinces (panel B) (see also Fig. 1).
Figure 6.
Boxplot of mean values of coppice to high forest ratio (cop.hfor) (panel A) and roe deer abundance (panel B) in TBE-positive and TBE-negative provinces of northern Italy (see also Fig. 1).
Table 4.
Akaike's Information Criterion (AICc) ranking of a priori models used to estimate dependence of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) human cases on vertebrate host and forest cover parameters.