Social contacts of school children and the transmission of respiratory-spread pathogens

Abstract

Empirical data about contact frequencies of children is needed for estimating parameters in mathematical modelling studies that investigate the effect of targeting influenza intervention to children. A survey about the social contacts of school children was conducted in a primary school in Germany. The distribution of the daily numbers of contacts was stratified by age of the contacted person and by weekday. A negative binomial regression analysis was performed to investigate factors that influence contact behaviour. Using logistic regression analysis we examined the relationship between the numbers of private contacts and having been ill in the last 6 months. We computed effective contact numbers to take the heterogeneity in contact behaviour into account in assessing the contribution of children's contacts to the overall transmission of an infection. The possible effects of intervention measures such as school closure and vaccination on the transmission of respiratory-spread agents to other age groups are discussed.

Collecting close-contact social mixing data with contact diaries: reporting errors and biases

“…For Table 1, we recoded the duration estimates of the participants into the time categories used by Mossong et al [8], Mikolajczyk et al [6], Horby et al [12], and Smieszek [11]. In this table, the higher duration estimate (columns) was cross-tabulated against the lower duration estimate (rows).…”

“…Methods have been developed to measure potentially contagious contacts in realworld settings. Currently, the dominant approach for measuring epidemiologically relevant contact data is contact diaries [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Empirical research on potentially contagious contacts, particularly the highly cited study by Mossong et al [8], has influenced the discussion on the patterns and risk factors of disease spread and has informed infectious disease modelling [e.g.…”

Um modelo para a dengue com influência sazonal

“…Dentre as quais, as mais comuns são a cólera, o sarampo, a influenza e a dengue [1,3,9,11]. A análise das séries temporais revela que, em muitos casos, existem picos epidêmicos de maior intensidade em períodos mais longos quando comparados, por exemplo, com as variações anuais nas taxas de transmissão.…”

Models of epidemics: when contact repetition and clustering should be included

“…The mean value of potentially contagious contacts can be interpreted in a meaningful way, since the distribution of daily contacts is unimodal with a clear "typical" number of contacts [12][13][14][15]. Potentially dominant properties of the underlying contact structure are the clustering of such contacts and their repetitiveness, i.e.…”