ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Household members do not contact each other at random: implications for infectious disease modelling.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Incorporating human dynamic populations in models of infectious disease transmission: a systematic review.BMC infectious diseases · 2022Pooled it
- Close encounters between infants and household members measured through wearable proximity sensors.PloS one · 2018Trial
- Role-specific household contact patterns in urban and rural China: Implications for influenza household transmission.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2027Article
- Redefining and estimating the early-phase reproduction ratio for epidemic outbreaks in spatially structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- A comparison of contact patterns derived from the population structure in agent-based models and empirical contact survey data.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Assessing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in African households from the reanalysis of serosurveys.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Relationship between household attributes and contact patterns in urban and rural South Africa.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Why population heterogeneity matters for modelling infectious diseases.Interface focus · 2025Article
- Factors Associated With the Transmission of the Delta Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Variant in Households: The Israeli COVID-19 Family Study (ICoFS).The Journal of infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Evolution of social contacts patterns in France over the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: results from the SocialCov survey.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Modelling the drivers of outbreak communication in online media news for improved event-based surveillance.PloS one · 2025Article
- Addressing current limitations of household transmission studies by collecting contact data.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Generalized contact matrices allow integrating socioeconomic variables into epidemic models.Science advances · 2024Article
- Repetition in social contacts: implications in modelling the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in pre-pandemic and pandemic settings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Estimation of introduction and transmission rates of SARS-CoV-2 in a prospective household study.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Population age and household structures shape transmission dynamics of emerging infectious diseases: a longitudinal microsimulation approach.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Exploring the impact of population ageing on the spread of emerging respiratory infections and the associated burden of mortality.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Longitudinal social contact data analysis: insights from 2 years of data collection in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC public health · 2023Article
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
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Airborne infectious diseases such as influenza are primarily transmitted from human to human by means of social contacts, and thus easily spread within households. Epidemic models, used to gain insight into infectious disease spread and control, typically rely on the assumption of random mixing within households. Until now, there has been no direct empirical evidence to support this assumption. Here, we present the first social contact survey specifically designed to study contact networks within households. The survey was conducted in Belgium (Flanders and Brussels) from 2010 to 2011. We analysed data from 318 households totalling 1266 individuals with household sizes ranging from two to seven members. Exponential-family random graph models (ERGMs) were fitted to the within-household contact networks to reveal the processes driving contact between household members, both on weekdays and weekends. The ERGMs showed a high degree of clustering and, specifically on weekdays, decreasing connectedness with increasing household size. Furthermore, we found that the odds of a contact between older siblings and between father and child are smaller than for any other pair. The epidemic simulation results suggest that within-household contact density is the main driver of differences in epidemic spread between complete and empirical-based household contact networks. The homogeneous mixing assumption may therefore be an adequate characterization of the within-household contact structure for the purpose of epidemic simulations. However, ignoring the contact density when inferring based on an epidemic model will result in biased estimates of within-household transmission rates. Further research regarding the implementation of within-household contact networks in epidemic models is necessary.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.