Opportunities for improved surveillance and control of dengue from age-specific case data
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Institut Pasteur, France
- University of Florida, United States
Abstract
One of the challenges faced by global disease surveillance efforts is the lack of comparability across systems. Reporting commonly focuses on overall incidence, despite differences in surveillance quality between and within countries. For most immunizing infections, the age distribution of incident cases provides a more robust picture of trends in transmission. We present a framework to estimate transmission intensity for dengue virus from age-specific incidence data, and apply it to 359 administrative units in Thailand, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. Our estimates correlate well with those derived from seroprevalence data (the gold standard), capture the expected spatial heterogeneity in risk, and correlate with known environmental drivers of transmission. We show how this approach could be used to guide the implementation of control strategies such as vaccination. Since age-specific counts are routinely collected by many surveillance systems, they represent a unique opportunity to further our understanding of disease burden and risk for many diseases.
Data availability
The code to implement the model described in our study is available at https://github.com/isabelrodbar/dengue_foi. The case data used for the analyses is publicly available and can be accessed through the following links links: Brazil- http://tabnet.datasus.gov.br/cgi/deftohtm.exe?sih/cnv/mruf.def; Thailand - http://www.boe.moph.go.th/boedb/surdata/index.php; Colombia - http://www.ins.gov.co/lineas-de-accion/Subdireccion-Vigilancia/sivigila/Paginas/vigilancia-rutinaria.aspxand https://www.sispro.gov.co/Pages/Home.aspx; Mexico - http://www.epidemiologia.salud.gob.mx/anuario/html/anuarios.html.
Article and author information
Author details
Isabel Rodriguez-Barraquer
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01AI114703-01)
- Derek A Cummings
European Research Council (804744)
- Henrik Salje
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Rodriguez-Barraquer et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Opportunities for improved surveillance and control of dengue from age-specific case data
eLife 8:e45474.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45474
Further reading
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
Background:
The role of circulating metabolites on child development is understudied. We investigated associations between children’s serum metabolome and early childhood development (ECD).
Methods:
Untargeted metabolomics was performed on serum samples of 5004 children aged 6–59 months, a subset of participants from the Brazilian National Survey on Child Nutrition (ENANI-2019). ECD was assessed using the Survey of Well-being of Young Children’s milestones questionnaire. The graded response model was used to estimate developmental age. Developmental quotient (DQ) was calculated as the developmental age divided by chronological age. Partial least square regression selected metabolites with a variable importance projection ≥1. The interaction between significant metabolites and the child’s age was tested.
Results:
Twenty-eight top-ranked metabolites were included in linear regression models adjusted for the child’s nutritional status, diet quality, and infant age. Cresol sulfate (β=–0.07; adjusted-p <0.001), hippuric acid (β=–0.06; adjusted-p <0.001), phenylacetylglutamine (β=–0.06; adjusted-p <0.001), and trimethylamine-N-oxide (β=–0.05; adjusted-p=0.002) showed inverse associations with DQ. We observed opposite directions in the association of DQ for creatinine (for children aged –1 SD: β=–0.05; pP=0.01;+1 SD: β=0.05; p=0.02) and methylhistidine (–1 SD: β = - 0.04; p=0.04;+1 SD: β=0.04; p=0.03).
Conclusions:
Serum biomarkers, including dietary and microbial-derived metabolites involved in the gut-brain axis, may potentially be used to track children at risk for developmental delays.
Funding:
Supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the Brazilian National Research Council.
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Several areas of the world suffer a notably high incidence of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli. To assess the impact of persistent cross-species transmission systems on the epidemiology of E. coli O157:H7 in Alberta, Canada, we sequenced and assembled E. coli O157:H7 isolates originating from collocated cattle and human populations, 2007–2015. We constructed a timed phylogeny using BEAST2 using a structured coalescent model. We then extended the tree with human isolates through 2019 to assess the long-term disease impact of locally persistent lineages. During 2007–2015, we estimated that 88.5% of human lineages arose from cattle lineages. We identified 11 persistent lineages local to Alberta, which were associated with 38.0% (95% CI 29.3%, 47.3%) of human isolates. During the later period, six locally persistent lineages continued to be associated with human illness, including 74.7% (95% CI 68.3%, 80.3%) of reported cases in 2018 and 2019. Our study identified multiple locally evolving lineages transmitted between cattle and humans persistently associated with E. coli O157:H7 illnesses for up to 13 y. Locally persistent lineages may be a principal cause of the high incidence of E. coli O157:H7 in locations such as Alberta and provide opportunities for focused control efforts.
