Tracking dengue transmission at a neighborhood level

摘要

The frequency of infectious disease depends on the distribution of population immunity, but these effects have yet to be characterized at neighborhood scales. Henrik Salje et al. (pp. 9535-9538) used the household location of 1,912 children with dengue who were admitted to a Bangkok hospital between 1995 and 2000 to investigate the microscale dynamics of dengue transmission and population immunity. The deadly dengue virus, transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, has four different variants, all of which circulate in Bangkok. The researchers used the variation in dengue type to characterize the spatiotemporal clustering of disease cases, finding evidence for localized dengue transmission at distances of under 1 km, possibly due to local dispersal of hosts and vectors.