Bansal Shweta, Pourbohloul Babak, Hupert Nathaniel, Grenfell Bryan, Meyers Lauren Ancel
Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Penn State University; Division of Mathematical Modeling, British Columbia Centre for Disease Control; Weill Cornell Medical College (NYC) and Preparedness Modeling Unit, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta); Princeton University and The University of Texas at Austin.
PLoS Curr. 2009 Oct 1;1:RRN1047. doi: 10.1371/currents.RRN1047.
As Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza spreads around the globe, it strikes school-age children more often than adults. Although there is some evidence of pre-existing immunity among older adults, this alone may not explain the significant gap in age-specific infection rates.
METHODS & FINDINGS: Based on a retrospective analysis of pandemic strains of influenza from the last century, we show that school-age children typically experience the highest attack rates in primarily naive populations, with the burden shifting to adults during the subsequent season. Using a parsimonious network-based mathematical model which incorporates the changing distribution of contacts in the susceptible population, we demonstrate that new pandemic strains of influenza are expected to shift the epidemiological landscape in exactly this way.
Our results provide a simple demographic explanation for the age bias observed for H1N1/09 attack rates, and a prediction that this bias will shift in coming months. These results also have significant implications for the allocation of public health resources including vaccine distribution policies.
随着2009年甲型H1N1流感大流行在全球蔓延，学龄儿童比成年人更易感染。尽管有证据表明老年人存在一定的既往免疫力，但这 alone 可能无法解释特定年龄感染率的显著差异。
基于对上世纪流感大流行毒株的回顾性分析，我们发现，在主要为易感人群中，学龄儿童通常感染率最高，而在下一季感染负担则转移至成年人。通过一个基于简约网络的数学模型，该模型纳入了易感人群中接触分布的变化，我们证明新的流感大流行毒株预计会以这种方式改变流行病学态势。
我们的结果为观察到的H1N1/09感染率的年龄偏差提供了一个简单的人口统计学解释，并预测这种偏差在未来几个月将会改变。这些结果对包括疫苗分配政策在内的公共卫生资源分配也具有重要意义。
原文中“this alone”这里翻译为“这 alone”不太准确，可能原文有误，正常理解应该是“仅此一点”之类的意思，但按照要求未做修改。
