ArticleEpidemics2018
Identifying human encounters that shape the transmission of Streptococcus pneumoniae and other acute respiratory infections.
Article in Epidemics, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Contact With Young Children Increases the Risk of Respiratory Infection in Older Adults in Europe-the RESCEU Study.The Journal of infectious diseases · 2022Trial
- Social contact patterns in the United Kingdom following the COVID-19 pandemic: The Reconnect cross-sectional survey.PLoS medicine · 2026Article
- Relationship between household attributes and contact patterns in urban and rural South Africa.PloS one · 2026Article
- Identification of age-group reservoirs for persistent vaccine-type pneumococcal carriage in rural Gambia.Pneumonia (Nathan Qld.) · 2025Article
- Social contacts and mixing patterns in rural Gambia.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Pre-vaccination carriage prevalence of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes among internally displaced people in Somaliland: a cross-sectional study.Pneumonia (Nathan Qld.) · 2024Article
- Article
- The impact of introduction of the 10-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine on pneumococcal carriage in Nigeria.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Unmasking Pneumococcal Carriage in a High Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Prevalence Population in two Community Cohorts in South Africa, 2016-2018: The PHIRST Study.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2023Article
- Phylogenetic inference of pneumococcal transmission from cross-sectional data, a pilot study.Wellcome open research · 2023Article
- Association of pneumococcal carriage in infants with the risk of carriage among their contacts in Nha Trang, Vietnam: A nested cross-sectional survey.PLoS medicine · 2022Article
- Factors associated with pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage: A systematic review.PLOS global public health · 2022Article
- Within and between classroom transmission patterns of seasonal influenza among primary school students in Matsumoto city, Japan.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Social Contact Patterns and Implications for Infectious Disease Transmission: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Contact Surveys.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2021Article
- A cross-sectional study measuring contact patterns using diaries in an urban and a rural community in South Africa, 2018.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Vaccine strategies to reduce the burden of pneumococcal disease in HIV-infected adults in Africa.Expert review of vaccines · 2020Review
- Estimating the contribution of different age strata to vaccine serotype pneumococcal transmission in the pre vaccine era: a modelling study.BMC medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Although patterns of social contacts are believed to be an important determinant of infectious disease transmission, it remains unclear how the frequency and nature of human interactions shape an individual's risk of infection. We analysed data on daily social encounters individually matched to data on S. pneumoniae carriage and acute respiratory symptoms (ARS), from 566 individuals who took part in a survey in South-West Uganda. We found that the frequency of physical (i.e. skin-to-skin), long (≥1 h) and household contacts - which capture some measure of close (i.e. relatively intimate) contact - was higher among pneumococcal carriers than non-carriers, and among people with ARS compared to those without, irrespective of their age. With each additional physical encounter the age-adjusted risk of carriage and ARS increased by 6% (95%CI 2-9%) and 7% (2-13%) respectively. In contrast, the number of casual contacts (<5 min long) was not associated with either pneumococcal carriage or ARS. A detailed analysis by age of contacts showed that the number of close contacts with young children (<5 years) was particularly higher among older children and adult carriers than non-carriers, while the higher number of contacts among people suffering from ARS was more homogeneous across contacts of all ages. Our findings provide key evidence that the frequency of close interpersonal contact is important for transmission of respiratory infections, but not that of casual contacts. Those results are essential for both improving disease prevention and control efforts as well as informing research on infectious disease dynamics and transmission models, and more studies should be undertaken to further validate our results.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.