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Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant

BACKGROUND: Models of infectious disease are increasingly utilising empirical contact data to quantify the number of potentially infectious contacts between age groups. While a growing body of data is being collected on contact patterns across many populations, less attention has been paid to the so...

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Autores principales: Campbell, Patricia Therese, McVernon, Jodie, Shrestha, Niraj, Nathan, Paula M., Geard, Nicholas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607568/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28931390
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8
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author Campbell, Patricia Therese
McVernon, Jodie
Shrestha, Niraj
Nathan, Paula M.
Geard, Nicholas
author_facet Campbell, Patricia Therese
McVernon, Jodie
Shrestha, Niraj
Nathan, Paula M.
Geard, Nicholas
author_sort Campbell, Patricia Therese
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Models of infectious disease are increasingly utilising empirical contact data to quantify the number of potentially infectious contacts between age groups. While a growing body of data is being collected on contact patterns across many populations, less attention has been paid to the social contacts of young infants. We collected information on the social contacts of primary carers of young infants and investigated their potential for use as a proxy for contacts made by their infant. METHODS: We recruited primary carers of infants under one year of age residing in two geographically, demographically and socioeconomically distinct local government areas of Melbourne, Australia — Boroondara and Hume — including a sub-group of Turkish-speaking participants. Participants recorded their own contacts in a paper diary and noted whether their infant was present or absent. Information collected included times at an address; description of location; and details on people contacted at the location. Descriptive summary measures and distributions of contacts by location type, intensity, day of contact and by age are reported. RESULTS: Of the 226 participants recruited, 220 completed diaries were returned. Participant contact patterns were similar across all groups, with respect to the types of locations, intensity and day of contact, with some variation in the number of unique daily contacts. The infant was present at around 85% of locations at which the primary carer contacted other individuals. The majority of contacts occurring when the infant was present were in Own Home (32%), Retail and Hospitality (18%) and Transport (18%) settings. The mean daily number of unique contacts by infants was estimated as 9.1, 8.7 and 6.5 in Boroondara, Hume (English) and Hume (Turkish), respectively, with a similar age distribution across each of our surveyed groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our demonstration that contact patterns of mothers with infants are reasonably robust to socioeconomic and cultural differences is a step forward in modelling infectious disease transmission. With infants spending most of their time in the company of their mother, contact patterns of mothers are a useful proxy measure of infant contact patterns. The age distribution of contacts made by infants estimated in this study may be used to supplement population-wide contact information commonly used in infectious disease transmission models. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-56075682017-09-24 Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant Campbell, Patricia Therese McVernon, Jodie Shrestha, Niraj Nathan, Paula M. Geard, Nicholas BMC Infect Dis Research Article BACKGROUND: Models of infectious disease are increasingly utilising empirical contact data to quantify the number of potentially infectious contacts between age groups. While a growing body of data is being collected on contact patterns across many populations, less attention has been paid to the social contacts of young infants. We collected information on the social contacts of primary carers of young infants and investigated their potential for use as a proxy for contacts made by their infant. METHODS: We recruited primary carers of infants under one year of age residing in two geographically, demographically and socioeconomically distinct local government areas of Melbourne, Australia — Boroondara and Hume — including a sub-group of Turkish-speaking participants. Participants recorded their own contacts in a paper diary and noted whether their infant was present or absent. Information collected included times at an address; description of location; and details on people contacted at the location. Descriptive summary measures and distributions of contacts by location type, intensity, day of contact and by age are reported. RESULTS: Of the 226 participants recruited, 220 completed diaries were returned. Participant contact patterns were similar across all groups, with respect to the types of locations, intensity and day of contact, with some variation in the number of unique daily contacts. The infant was present at around 85% of locations at which the primary carer contacted other individuals. The majority of contacts occurring when the infant was present were in Own Home (32%), Retail and Hospitality (18%) and Transport (18%) settings. The mean daily number of unique contacts by infants was estimated as 9.1, 8.7 and 6.5 in Boroondara, Hume (English) and Hume (Turkish), respectively, with a similar age distribution across each of our surveyed groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our demonstration that contact patterns of mothers with infants are reasonably robust to socioeconomic and cultural differences is a step forward in modelling infectious disease transmission. With infants spending most of their time in the company of their mother, contact patterns of mothers are a useful proxy measure of infant contact patterns. The age distribution of contacts made by infants estimated in this study may be used to supplement population-wide contact information commonly used in infectious disease transmission models. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2017-09-20 /pmc/articles/PMC5607568/ /pubmed/28931390 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Campbell, Patricia Therese
McVernon, Jodie
Shrestha, Niraj
Nathan, Paula M.
Geard, Nicholas
Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title_full Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title_fullStr Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title_full_unstemmed Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title_short Who’s holding the baby? A prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
title_sort who’s holding the baby? a prospective diary study of the contact patterns of mothers with an infant
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607568/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28931390
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2735-8
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