Indigenous Australian household structure: a simple data collection tool and implications for close contact transmission of communicable diseases

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1 School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2 Menzies School of Health Resarch, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
3 NT Medical Program, Flinders and Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
4 Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
5 Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Laboratory, The Royal Melbourne Hospital and The University of Melbourne, at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
6 School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
7 Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
8 Victorian Infectious Diseases Service, The Royal Melbourne Hospital and The University of Melbourne, at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
9 Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
10 School of Computing and Information Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Anthropology, Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Public Health
Keywords
Indigenous, housing, communicable diseases, influenza, demographics, social contact, Aboriginal
Copyright
© 2017 Vino et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Vino T, Singh GR, Davison B, Campbell PT, Lydeamore M, Robinson A, McVernon J, Tong SY, Geard N. 2017. Indigenous Australian household structure: a simple data collection tool and implications for close contact transmission of communicable diseases. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3022v1

Abstract

Households are an important location for the transmission of communicable diseases. Social contact between household members is typically more frequent, of greater intensity, and is more likely to involve people of different age groups than contact occurring in the general community. Understanding household structure in different populations is therefore fundamental to explaining patterns of disease transmission in these populations. Indigenous populations in Australia tend to live in larger households than non Indigenous populations, but limited data is available on the structure of these households, and how they differ between remote and urban communities. We have developed a novel approach to the collection of household structure data, suitable for use in a variety of contexts, which provides a detailed view of age,gender, and room occupancy patterns in remote and urban Australian Indigenous households. Here we report analysis of data collected using this tool, which quantifies the extent of crowding in Indigenous households, particularly in remote areas. We use this data to generate matrices of age-specific contact rates, as used by mathematical models of infectious disease transmission. To demonstrate the impact of household structure, we use a mathematical model to simulate an influenza-like illness in different populations. Our simulations suggest that outbreaks in remote populations are likely to spread more rapidly and to a greater extent than outbreaks in non-Indigenous populations.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

Supplemental Information

R_code

R code for figures and analysis

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1/supp-1

Supplemental figures

Supplemental figures

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1/supp-2

Raw data for household structure

The ethics review board has recently approved the provision of the de-identified raw dataset to be associated with the publication and for it to be made openly available.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1/supp-4

Information brochure

Information brochure for participants in the Aboriginal Birth Cohort Study

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1/supp-5

Information sheet

Information sheet to accompany informed consent forms for the Aboriginal Birth Cohort Study

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1/supp-6