The Contribution of Social Behaviour to the Transmission of Influenza A in a Human Population

PLoS Pathogens

Justin Lessler¹  Steven Riley²  Derek A. Cummings²  Adam J. Kucharski³  Kin O. Kwok⁴  Benjamin J. Cowling⁵  Jonathan M. Read⁵  Vivian W. I. Wei⁵ 

[1] Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Institute of Infection and Global Health, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom;Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America;Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom;MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

关键词: Infectious disease epidemiology;    Age groups;    Respiratory infections;    Influenza;    Behavior;    Hong Kong;    Collective human behavior;    Serology;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.ppat.1004206

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Variability in the risk of transmission for respiratory pathogens can result from several factors, including the intrinsic properties of the pathogen, the immune state of the host and the host's behaviour. It has been proposed that self-reported social mixing patterns can explain the behavioural component of this variability, with simulated intervention studies based on these data used routinely to inform public health policy. However, in the absence of robust studies with biological endpoints for individuals, it is unclear how age and social behaviour contribute to infection risk. To examine how the structure and nature of social contacts influenced infection risk over the course of a single epidemic, we designed a flexible disease modelling framework: the population was divided into a series of increasingly detailed age and social contact classes, with the transmissibility of each age-contact class determined by the average contacts of that class. Fitting the models to serologically confirmed infection data from the 2009 Hong Kong influenza A/H1N1p pandemic, we found that an individual's risk of infection was influenced strongly by the average reported social mixing behaviour of their age group, rather than by their personal reported contacts. We also identified the resolution of social mixing that shaped transmission: epidemic dynamics were driven by intense contacts between children, a post-childhood drop in risky contacts and a subsequent rise in contacts for individuals aged 35–50. Our results demonstrate that self-reported social contact surveys can account for age-associated heterogeneity in the transmission of a respiratory pathogen in humans, and show robustly how these individual-level behaviours manifest themselves through assortative age groups. Our results suggest it is possible to profile the social structure of different populations and to use these aggregated data to predict their inherent transmission potential.

【 授权许可】

CC BY