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The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics

BACKGROUND: Contact tracing plays an important role in the control of emerging infectious diseases, but little is known yet about its effectiveness. Here we deduce from a generic mathematical model how effectiveness of tracing relates to various aspects of time, such as the course of individual infe...

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Autores principales: Klinkenberg, Don, Fraser, Christophe, Heesterbeek, Hans
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2006
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1762362/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17183638
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000012
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author Klinkenberg, Don
Fraser, Christophe
Heesterbeek, Hans
author_facet Klinkenberg, Don
Fraser, Christophe
Heesterbeek, Hans
author_sort Klinkenberg, Don
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Contact tracing plays an important role in the control of emerging infectious diseases, but little is known yet about its effectiveness. Here we deduce from a generic mathematical model how effectiveness of tracing relates to various aspects of time, such as the course of individual infectivity, the (variability in) time between infection and symptom-based detection, and delays in the tracing process. In addition, the possibility of iteratively tracing of yet asymptomatic infecteds is considered. With these insights we explain why contact tracing was and will be effective for control of smallpox and SARS, only partially effective for foot-and-mouth disease, and likely not effective for influenza. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We investigate contact tracing in a model of an emerging epidemic that is flexible enough to use for most infections. We consider isolation of symptomatic infecteds as the basic scenario, and express effectiveness as the proportion of contacts that need to be traced for a reproduction ratio smaller than 1. We obtain general results for special cases, which are interpreted with respect to the likely success of tracing for influenza, smallpox, SARS, and foot-and-mouth disease epidemics. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that (1) there is no general predictive formula for the proportion to be traced as there is for the proportion to be vaccinated; (2) variability in time to detection is favourable for effective tracing; (3) tracing effectiveness need not be sensitive to the duration of the latent period and tracing delays; (4) iterative tracing primarily improves effectiveness when single-step tracing is on the brink of being effective.
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spelling pubmed-17623622007-01-04 The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics Klinkenberg, Don Fraser, Christophe Heesterbeek, Hans PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: Contact tracing plays an important role in the control of emerging infectious diseases, but little is known yet about its effectiveness. Here we deduce from a generic mathematical model how effectiveness of tracing relates to various aspects of time, such as the course of individual infectivity, the (variability in) time between infection and symptom-based detection, and delays in the tracing process. In addition, the possibility of iteratively tracing of yet asymptomatic infecteds is considered. With these insights we explain why contact tracing was and will be effective for control of smallpox and SARS, only partially effective for foot-and-mouth disease, and likely not effective for influenza. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We investigate contact tracing in a model of an emerging epidemic that is flexible enough to use for most infections. We consider isolation of symptomatic infecteds as the basic scenario, and express effectiveness as the proportion of contacts that need to be traced for a reproduction ratio smaller than 1. We obtain general results for special cases, which are interpreted with respect to the likely success of tracing for influenza, smallpox, SARS, and foot-and-mouth disease epidemics. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that (1) there is no general predictive formula for the proportion to be traced as there is for the proportion to be vaccinated; (2) variability in time to detection is favourable for effective tracing; (3) tracing effectiveness need not be sensitive to the duration of the latent period and tracing delays; (4) iterative tracing primarily improves effectiveness when single-step tracing is on the brink of being effective. Public Library of Science 2006-12-20 /pmc/articles/PMC1762362/ /pubmed/17183638 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000012 Text en Klinkenberg et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Klinkenberg, Don
Fraser, Christophe
Heesterbeek, Hans
The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title_full The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title_fullStr The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title_full_unstemmed The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title_short The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics
title_sort effectiveness of contact tracing in emerging epidemics
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1762362/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17183638
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000012
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