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National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

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Your Environment. Your Health.

Publication Detail

Title: Protective population behavior change in outbreaks of emerging infectious disease.

Authors: Lodge, Evans K; Schatz, Annakate M; Drake, John M

Published In BMC Infect Dis, (2021 Jun 15)

Abstract: BACKGROUND: During outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging infections, the lack of effective drugs and vaccines increases reliance on non-pharmacologic public health interventions and behavior change to limit human-to-human transmission. Interventions that increase the speed with which infected individuals remove themselves from the susceptible population are paramount, particularly isolation and hospitalization. Ebola virus disease (EVD), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are zoonotic viruses that have caused significant recent outbreaks with sustained human-to-human transmission. METHODS: This investigation quantified changing mean removal rates (MRR) and days from symptom onset to hospitalization (DSOH) of infected individuals from the population in seven different outbreaks of EVD, SARS, and MERS, to test for statistically significant differences in these metrics between outbreaks. RESULTS: We found that epidemic week and viral serial interval were correlated with the speed with which populations developed and maintained health behaviors in each outbreak. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight intrinsic population-level changes in isolation rates in multiple epidemics of three zoonotic infections with established human-to-human transmission and significant morbidity and mortality. These data are particularly useful for disease modelers seeking to forecast the spread of emerging pathogens.

PubMed ID: 34130652 Exiting the NIEHS site

MeSH Terms: Animals; Communicable Disease Control/methods*; Communicable Diseases, Emerging/epidemiology*; Communicable Diseases, Emerging/prevention & control*; Coronavirus Infections/epidemiology; Coronavirus Infections/prevention & control; Disease Outbreaks*; Epidemics/prevention & control; Forecasting; Health Behavior*; Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola/epidemiology; Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola/prevention & control; Humans; Public Health; Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome/epidemiology; Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome/prevention & control; Zoonoses/epidemiology; Zoonoses/prevention & control

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