Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jun 2, 2022
Date Accepted: Nov 4, 2022
Risks, epidemics, and prevention measures of infectious diseases in major sports events: a scoping review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Major sports events are the focus of the world. However, the gathering of crowds during these events creates huge risks of infectious diseases transmission.
Objective:
It is thus of great public health significance to systematically review the epidemiological characteristics and prevention measures of infectious diseases.
Methods:
The procedure of the scoping review followed Arksey and O’Malley’s five-step methodological framework. Electronic databases, including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and Embase, were searched systematically. The general information (i.e., publication year, study type) of each study, sports events’ feature (i.e., date, and host place), infectious diseases’ epidemiological characteristics (i.e., epidemics, risk factors), prevention measures, and surveillance paradigm were extracted, categorized and summarized.
Results:
A total of 24,460 articles were searched from databases, and 358 studies were included in the final data synthesis based on selection criteria. A rapid growth of studies is found over recent years. Studies investigating epidemics and risk factors for sports events increased from 16 studies before 2000 (6.3%), to 201 studies after 2010 (79.1%). Studies focused on prevention measures of infectious disease accounted for over 85.0% of literatures published after 2011. A variety of infectious diseases have been reported, including respiratory tract infection, gastrointestinal infection, vector-borne infection, blood-borne infection, and water contact infection. Among them, respiratory tract infections were the most concerning diseases (69.8%). Beside some routine prevention measures targeted at risk factors of different diseases, strengthening surveillance was highlighted in previous literature. It was found that the surveillance system gone through three stages of development, including manual archiving, network-based systems, and automated intelligent platforms.
Conclusions:
The critical summary and collation of previous empirical evidence is meaningful to provide references for holding major sports events. It is essential to improve the surveillance techniques for timely detecting the emergence of epidemic and risk perception in future practice.
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