Publications by authors named "Moses Chapa Kiti"
Background: Low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) bear a disproportionate burden of communicable diseases. Social interaction data inform infectious disease models and disease prevention strategies. The variations in demographics and contact patterns across ages, cultures, and locations significantly impact infectious disease dynamics and pathogen transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) bear a disproportionate burden of communicable diseases. Social interaction data inform infectious disease models and disease prevention strategies. The variations in demographics and contact patterns across ages, cultures, and locations significantly impact infectious disease dynamics and pathogen transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfluenza causes significant mortality and morbidity in the United States (US). Employees are exposed to influenza at work and can spread it to others. The influenza vaccine is safe, effective, and prevents severe outcomes; however, coverage among US adults (50.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- * A systematic review and meta-analysis of surveys from low- and middle-income countries revealed that contact rates do not decline with age as they do in high-income settings, and large, intergenerational households are common in lower-income areas.
- * The findings indicate that differences in how people interact in various income settings could impact the spread of diseases and the success of control strategies.
Article Synopsis
- - This study analyzes how contact patterns for spreading respiratory pathogens, like SARS-CoV-2, vary between low/middle-income and high-income countries, using data from 28,503 participants and over 413,000 contacts.
- - Unlike high-income settings where contact rates decrease with age, low-income settings show similar contact levels across ages, notably featuring larger, multi-generational households that engage more often in home-based contacts.
- - These differing contact patterns have significant implications for understanding how respiratory viruses spread and the effectiveness of public health interventions, particularly the differences in social behavior across income levels.
Social contact patterns shape the transmission of respiratory infections spread via close interactions. There is a paucity of observational data from schools and households, particularly in developing countries. Portable wireless sensors can record unbiased proximity events between individuals facing each other, shedding light on pathways of infection transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Improved understanding and quantification of social contact patterns that govern the transmission dynamics of respiratory viral infections has utility in the design of preventative and control measures such as vaccination and social distancing. The objective of this study was to quantify an age-specific matrix of contact rates for a predominantly rural low-income population that would support transmission dynamic modeling of respiratory viruses.
Methods And Findings: From the population register of the Kilifi Health and Demographic Surveillance System, coastal Kenya, 150 individuals per age group (<1, 1-5, 6-15, 16-19, 20-49, 50 and above, in years) were selected by stratified random sampling and requested to complete a day long paper diary of physical contacts (e.