“The Calendar of Epidemics: Seasonal Cycles of Infectious Diseases”, 2018-11-08 (; backlinks; similar):
Seasonal cyclicity is an ubiquitous feature of acute infectious diseases1 and may be an ubiquitous feature of human infectious diseases in general, as illustrated in Tables 11–4. Each acute infectious disease has its own seasonal window of occurrence, which, importantly, may vary among geographic locations and differ from other diseases within the same location. Here we explore the concept of an epidemic calendar, which is the idea that seasonality is an unifying feature of epidemic-prone diseases and, in the absence of control measures, the local calendar can be marked by epidemics (Fig 1). A well-known example of a calendar marked by epidemics is that of the Northern Hemisphere, where influenza outbreaks occur each winter [2, 3] (hence the colloquial reference to winter as “the flu season”). In contrast, chickenpox outbreaks peak each spring [4, 5], and polio transmission historically occurred each summer6.
…In the broadest sense, seasonal drivers can be separated into four categories: (1) environmental factors, (2) host behavior, (3) host phenology, and (4) exogenous biotic factors. These seasonal drivers may enter into disease transmission dynamics by way of hosts, reservoirs, and/or vectors. In surveying the literature to gauge the breadth of seasonal drivers acting upon human infectious disease systems (Tables 11–4), specific seasonal drivers were found to include (a) vector seasonality, (b) seasonality in nonhuman animal host (ie. livestock, other domestic animals, or wildlife), (c) seasonal climate (eg. temperature, precipitation, etc.), (d) seasonal nonclimatic abiotic environment (eg. water salinity), (e) seasonal co-infection, (f) seasonal exposure and/or behavior and/or contact rate, (g) seasonal biotic environment (eg. algal density in waterbodies), and (h) seasonal flare-ups/symptoms and/or remission/latency.