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
