Modeling household transmission dynamics: Application to waterborne diarrheal disease in Central Africa

PLoS One. 2018 Nov 7;13(11):e0206418. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206418. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Introduction: We describe a method for analyzing the within-household network dynamics of a disease transmission. We apply it to analyze the occurrences of endemic diarrheal disease in Cameroon, Central Africa based on observational, cross-sectional data available from household health surveys.

Methods: To analyze the data, we apply formalism of the dynamic SID (susceptible-infected-diseased) process that describes the disease steady-state while adjusting for the household age-structure and environment contamination, such as water contamination. The SID transmission rates are estimated via MCMC method with the help of the so-called synthetic likelihood approach.

Results: The SID model is fitted to a dataset on diarrhea occurrence from 63 households in Cameroon. We show that the model allows for quantification of the effects of drinking water contamination on both transmission and recovery rates for household diarrheal disease occurrence as well as for estimation of the rate of silent (unobserved) infections.

Conclusions: The new estimation method appears capable of genuinely capturing the complex dynamics of disease transmission across various human, animal and environmental compartments at the household level. Our approach is quite general and can be used in other epidemiological settings where it is desirable to fit transmission rates using cross-sectional data.

Software sharing: The R-scripts for carrying out the computational analysis described in the paper are available at https://github.com/cbskust/SID.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cameroon / epidemiology
  • Cross-Sectional Studies
  • Diarrhea / epidemiology*
  • Disease Transmission, Infectious / statistics & numerical data*
  • Endemic Diseases / statistics & numerical data*
  • Health Surveys
  • Housing*
  • Humans
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Water Pollution

Grants and funding

The funders include the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at The Ohio State University through its National Science Foundation grant (NSF-DMS1440386 to GR) and the National Research Foundation of Korea grant (NRF- 2017R1D1A3B03031008 to BC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.