Indigenous Australian household structure: a simple data collection tool and implications for close contact transmission of communicable diseases
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
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.
Cite this as
2017. Indigenous Australian household structure: a simple data collection tool and implications for close contact transmission of communicable diseases. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3022v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3022v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Supplemental Information
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.
Information brochure
Information brochure for participants in the Aboriginal Birth Cohort Study
Information sheet
Information sheet to accompany informed consent forms for the Aboriginal Birth Cohort Study
Additional Information
Competing Interests
Steven Y. C. Tong is an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Author Contributions
Thiripura Vino conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Gurmeet R Singh conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Belinda Davison contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Patricia T Campbell performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Michael Lydeamore performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Andrew Robinson reviewed drafts of the paper.
Jodie McVernon reviewed drafts of the paper.
Steven YC Tong conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Nicholas Geard conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Human Ethics
The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):
Human Research Ethics Committee of NT Department of Health and Menzies School of Health Research
Funding
The project was supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) project grant (#1098319). SYCT is a NHMRC Career Development Fellow (#1065736). Data collection for the ABC study, GS and BD are supported by the NHMRC (#1046391). JM is supported by NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship (#1117140). AR is supported by Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis. TV and ML are supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
