Epidemiology of Lyme borreliosis based on outpatient claims data of all people with statutory health insurance, Germany, 2019.

IntroductionEvidence of nationwide and regional morbidity of Lyme borreliosis (LB) in Germany is lacking.AimsWe calculated the total number of incident LB cases in Germany in 2019, compared regional variations, investigated the extent of possible under-reporting in notification data and examined the association between high incidence areas and land cover composition.MethodsWe used outpatient claims data comprising information for people with statutory health insurance who visited a physician at least once between 2010 and 2019 in Germany (n = 71,411,504). The ICD-10 code A69.2 was used to identify incident LB patients. Spatial variations of LB were assessed by means of Global and Local Moran's Index at district level. Notification data were obtained for nine federal states with mandatory notification from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).ResultsOf all insured, 128,177 were diagnosed with LB in 2019, corresponding to an incidence of 179 per 100,000 insured. The incidence varied across districts by a factor of 16 (range: 40-646 per 100,000). We identified four spatial clusters with high incidences. These clusters were associated with a significantly larger proportion of forests and agricultural areas than low incidence clusters. In 2019, 12,264 LB cases were reported to the RKI from nine federal states, while 69,623 patients with LB were found in claims data for those states. This difference varied considerably across districts.ConclusionsThese findings serve as a solid basis for regionally tailored population-based intervention programmes and can support modelling studies assessing the development of LB epidemiology under various climate change scenarios.

Relative Abundance of Thiolated Species of As, Mo, W, and Sb in Hot Springs of Yellowstone National Park and Iceland.

Geothermal waters often are enriched in trace metal(loid)s, such as arsenic, antimony, molybdenum, and tungsten. The presence of sulfide can lead to the formation of thiolated anions; however, their contributions to total element concentrations typically remain unknown because nonsuitable sample stabilization and chromatographic separation methods convert them to oxyanions. Here, the concurrent widespread occurrence of thioarsenates, thiomolybdates, thiotungstates, and thioantimonates, in sulfide-rich hot springs from Yellowstone National Park and Iceland is shown. More thiolation was generally observed at higher molar sulfide to metal(loid) excess (Iceland > Yellowstone). Thioarsenates were the most prominent and ubiquitous thiolated species, with trithioarsenate typically dominating arsenic speciation. In some Icelandic hot springs, arsenic was nearly quantitatively thiolated. Also, for molybdenum, thioanions dominated over oxyanions in many Icelandic hot springs. For tungsten and antimony, oxyanions typically dominated and thioanions were observed less frequently, but still contributed up to a few tens of percent in some springs. This order of relative abundance (thioarsenates > thiomolybdates > thiotungstates ≈ thioantimonates) was also observed when looking at processes triggering transformation of thioanions such as mixing with non-geothermal waters or H2S degassing and oxidation with increasing distance from a discharge. Even though to different extents, thiolation contributed substantially to speciation of all four elements studied, indicating that their analysis is required when studying geothermal systems.

Long-term daily hydrometeorological drought indices, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration for ICOS sites.

Eddy covariance sites are ideally suited for the study of extreme events on ecosystems as they allow the exchange of trace gases and energy fluxes between ecosystems and the lower atmosphere to be directly measured on a continuous basis. However, standardized definitions of hydroclimatic extremes are needed to render studies of extreme events comparable across sites. This requires longer datasets than are available from on-site measurements in order to capture the full range of climatic variability. We present a dataset of drought indices based on precipitation (Standardized Precipitation Index, SPI), atmospheric water balance (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, SPEI), and soil moisture (Standardized Soil Moisture Index, SSMI) for 101 ecosystem sites from the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) with daily temporal resolution from 1950 to 2021. Additionally, we provide simulated soil moisture and evapotranspiration for each site from the Mesoscale Hydrological Model (mHM). These could be utilised for gap-filling or long-term research, among other applications. We validate our data set with measurements from ICOS and discuss potential research avenues.