Characterizing Ebola Transmission Patterns Based on Internet News Reports
| Autor: | Lone Simonsen, Cécile Viboud, Gerardo Chowell, A. M. Hurtado, Julie M. Cleaton |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Microbiology (medical)
Male medicine.medical_specialty Burial 030231 tropical medicine Context (language use) medicine.disease_cause Sierra leone Disease Outbreaks 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Epidemiology Case fatality rate medicine Humans 030212 general & internal medicine Mass Media Disease Notification Articles and Commentaries Retrospective Studies Internet Ebola virus business.industry Outbreak Hemorrhagic Fever Ebola Hospitalization Infectious Diseases Immunology Emerging infectious disease Female business Demography |
| Zdroj: | Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. 62(1) |
| ISSN: | 1537-6591 |
| Popis: | BACKGROUND Detailed information on patient exposure, contact patterns, and discharge status is rarely available in real time from traditional surveillance systems in the context of an emerging infectious disease outbreak. Here, we validate the systematic collection of Internet news reports to characterize epidemiological patterns of Ebola virus disease (EVD) infections during the West African 2014-2015 outbreak. METHODS Based on 58 news reports, we analyzed 79 EVD clusters (286 cases) ranging in size from 1 to 33 cases between January 2014 and February 2015 in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. RESULTS The majority of reported exposures stemmed from contact with family members (57.3%) followed by hospitals (18.2%) and funerals (12.7%). Our data indicate that funeral exposure was significantly more frequent in Sierra Leone (27.3%) followed by Guinea (18.2%) and Liberia (1.8%; χ(2) test; P < .0001). Funeral exposure was the dominant route of transmission until April 2014 (60%) and was replaced with hospital exposure in June 2014-July 2014 (70%), both of which declined after interventions were put in place. The mean reproduction number of the outbreak was 2.3 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.8, 2.7). The case fatality rate was estimated at 74.4% (95% CI, 68.3, 79.8). CONCLUSIONS Overall, our findings based on news reports are in close agreement with those derived from traditional epidemiological surveillance data and with those reported for prior outbreaks. Our findings support the use of real-time information from trustworthy news reports to provide timely estimates of key epidemiological parameters that may be hard to ascertain otherwise. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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