About Chinese Journal of Endemiology

Chinese Journal of Endemiology

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Endemiology is a Chinese-language public-health journal devoted to endemic diseases — diseases that occur persistently in particular places because of local environmental, geological or nutritional conditions. It is based in Harbin, Heilongjiang, in China's northeast. The journal is sponsored by the Chinese Medical Association and Harbin Medical University under the Ministry of Health, and it is now published by the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House, the publishing arm of the Chinese Medical Association. Its original print ISSN was 1000-4955; its current ISSN is 2095-4255, and its Chinese domestic number is CN 23-1276/R, the "23" prefix indicating registration in Heilongjiang. Scopus coverage of the journal is recorded from 2005. Its subject scope covers the classic endemic diseases of China: iodine deficiency disorders, endemic fluorosis and arsenicosis, Kashin-Beck disease and Keshan disease, together with the prevention and control programmes directed against them.

What endemiology means in China

To understand the journal, it is necessary to understand its discipline. In Chinese public health, "endemic diseases" (difangbing) form a recognised administrative and scientific category distinct from infectious diseases generally. They are conditions caused by the local environment: too little iodine in soil and water, producing goitre and impaired development; too much fluoride in drinking water, coal smoke or tea, producing dental and skeletal fluorosis; excess arsenic in groundwater, producing arsenicosis; and the still-debated environmental causes of Kashin-Beck disease, an osteoarthropathy of children, and Keshan disease, a cardiomyopathy, both historically concentrated in a belt across northern and central China. China built a dedicated control system for these diseases, with specialised institutes, provincial endemic-disease stations and national prevention programmes. The Chinese Journal of Endemiology is the scholarly journal of that professional world, and its Harbin base places it in the northeastern region where Keshan disease and Kashin-Beck disease were historically most prominent.

Sponsorship and publishing home

The journal's sponsorship joins China's national medical association with one of its leading northeastern medical universities. The Chinese Medical Association is the country's principal medical professional body, and its journals — the large Zhonghua and Chinese Journal families — are the core of Chinese medical publishing. Harbin Medical University, in the Heilongjiang provincial capital, has a distinguished history in endemic-disease research: the university's researchers were central to the study of Keshan disease and Kashin-Beck disease in Heilongjiang and neighbouring provinces, and the region's institutes conducted foundational work on the selenium and environmental hypotheses for those conditions. Publication is now handled by the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House in Beijing, which publishes the Chinese Medical Association's journal portfolio. The change of ISSN from 1000-4955 to 2095-4255 records a modernisation of the journal's registration in the course of these publishing arrangements, and citations to the journal may appear under either ISSN depending on the period.

Scope: iodine deficiency and its control

Iodine deficiency disorders are a central theme of the journal. China historically had one of the world's largest populations at risk of iodine deficiency, with endemic goitre and cretinism in mountainous and inland regions far from the sea. The national programme of universal salt iodisation, implemented from the mid-1990s, transformed the situation, and the journal's pages document the science of that programme: population iodine nutrition surveys, urinary iodine monitoring, thyroid disease surveillance, the adjustment of salt iodine concentrations, and the continuing surveillance needed to keep intake adequate without excess. Articles in the journal address both the remaining pockets of deficiency and the newer questions raised by success, including thyroid disease patterns in iodine-sufficient populations. This surveillance-and-policy content distinguishes endemiology journals from purely clinical titles.

Scope: fluorosis, arsenicosis and environmental exposure

Endemic fluorosis and arsenicosis form the second great theme. In parts of China, fluoride exposure comes from high-fluoride drinking water; in others, notably in Guizhou, from indoor burning of high-fluoride coal for drying food and heating; and in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere, brick tea high in fluoride is a further source. Endemic arsenicosis is associated with high-arsenic groundwater in regions including Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Xinjiang, and with coal-burning exposure in Guizhou. The journal publishes studies of exposure assessment, biomarkers, clinical manifestations including skin lesions and skeletal damage, and the engineering and behavioural interventions — water improvement, stove improvement, source substitution — by which exposure is reduced. Its content therefore spans toxicology, environmental health, clinical medicine and public-health engineering.

Scope: Kashin-Beck and Keshan diseases

The third theme is the pair of diseases most closely associated with the journal's home region. Kashin-Beck disease is a chronic, disabling osteoarthritis-like condition of children and adolescents, historically endemic across a broad belt from Heilongjiang through central China to Tibet, associated in research with selenium deficiency, fungal toxins in stored grain and organic matter in drinking water. Keshan disease, named after Keshan County in Heilongjiang where it was characterised, is an endemic cardiomyopathy linked in research to selenium deficiency and possible viral co-factors, which once caused devastating outbreaks of acute heart failure in rural northeastern communities. Both diseases have declined dramatically with economic development, dietary diversification and control programmes, and the journal documents their epidemiology, aetiological research, treatment and the continuing monitoring of historically affected areas. Its archive is a primary scientific record of two diseases that are studied almost nowhere else in the world at comparable depth.

Readership and professional role

The journal's readers are the staff of China's endemic-disease control system: researchers at national and provincial institutes for endemic disease control, workers in local disease-control stations, environmental health specialists, and clinicians treating endemic conditions. Its authors come from the same system, together with medical universities such as Harbin Medical University. Because the control of endemic diseases in China is organised as a governmental programme with targets, standards and surveillance systems, the journal functions partly as a technical bulletin for that programme — publishing monitoring results, programme evaluations and methodological standards — as well as a research journal. Its Chinese language is appropriate to that domestic professional mission.

Indexing and bibliographic record

Scopus coverage of the journal from 2005 gives its recent decades visibility in international bibliographic systems, and its articles are recorded in Chinese databases serving the domestic profession. Citations appear under the journal's Chinese title, Zhonghua Difangbingxue Zazhi in its Zhonghua-series form in recent years, as well as under its English translated title, Chinese Journal of Endemiology. The ISSN change from 1000-4955 to 2095-4255 and the CN number 23-1276/R are the key facts for linking its records across periods. Researchers using its older literature, particularly on Keshan and Kashin-Beck disease, should search under both ISSNs and both language forms of the title.

How to cite and identify the journal

The reliable identifiers of the Chinese Journal of Endemiology are its exact title, its current ISSN 2095-4255 (originally 1000-4955), CN 23-1276/R, its Harbin base, its sponsorship by the Chinese Medical Association and Harbin Medical University, and its publication by the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House. It should not be confused with journals of epidemiology — endemiology, the study of endemic diseases, is a different discipline from epidemiology — nor with China's separate journals on schistosomiasis and other parasitic diseases, which belong to the infectious-disease system rather than the endemic-disease system. Cited by title and ISSN, it uniquely identifies the Harbin-based journal described in this profile.