Abstract
Insight into how humans interact helps further understanding of the transmission of infectious diseases. For diseases such as pertussis, infants are at particular risk for severe outcomes. To understand the contact pattern of infants, especially those too young to be vaccinated, we sent contact diaries to a representative sample of 1000 mothers in the United Kingdom. We received 115 responses with a total of 758 recorded contacts. The average number of daily contacts for an infant was 6.68 overall and 5.7 for those aged ≤10 weeks. Of the latter, 2.1 (37%) contacts were with non-household members and were >15 minutes duration, suggesting that a cocooning programme may miss a substantial proportion of exposures leading to disease transmission. The least contact was between adolescents and infants. Thus the impact of adolescent (pertussis) vaccination on infants would likely be limited, unless it reduces transmission to other age groups whose contact with infants is greater.
Highlights
A great number of infectious diseases are solely transmitted directly from person to person, an understanding of contact patterns between individuals is essential in understanding the transmission of these diseases [1,2,3]
Several age-stratified contact studies have been performed [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] yet the contact patterns of very young infants remain poorly described. This is despite the fact that for certain infections, such as pertussis, the greatest risk of a severe outcome is shortly after birth, before the infant becomes eligible for vaccination
The contact diary collected information on the persons who contacted the infant; namely gender, age, whether the person was a member of the household, location of the contact, the total time spent in presence of the infant (,5 min, 5–14 min,15– 59 min,1–4 hours, more than 4 hours), if the person touched the infant, if this contact lasted longer than 5 minutes and how often the infant usually would have contact with this person
Summary
A great number of infectious diseases are solely transmitted directly from person to person, an understanding of contact patterns between individuals is essential in understanding the transmission of these diseases [1,2,3]. When documenting contact patterns it is important to have a qualitative description of the type and nature of contact and a quantitative description; the average number of contacts between gender/age groups/risk group on a day This quantitative description (contact matrix) is a key input in infectious disease models that simulate the transmission of diseases in the population [3]. Several age-stratified contact studies have been performed [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] yet the contact patterns of very young infants remain poorly described This is despite the fact that for certain infections, such as pertussis, the greatest risk of a severe outcome is shortly after birth, before the infant becomes eligible for vaccination. Such interventions remain topical with an outbreak of pertussis in England (end 2011–2012) resulting in 14 reported infant deaths in 2012 [12]
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