Giebultowicz Sophia, Ali Mohammad, Yunus Mohammad, Emch Michael
Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Saunders Hall, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220, USA.
Interdiscip Perspect Infect Dis. 2011;2011:604372. doi: 10.1155/2011/604372. Epub 2011 Dec 7.
This study uses social network and spatial analytical methods simultaneously to understand cholera transmission in rural Bangladesh. Both have been used separately to incorporate context into health studies, but using them together is a new and recent approach. Data include a spatially referenced longitudinal demographic database consisting of approximately 200,000 people and a database of all laboratory-confirmed cholera cases from 1983 to 2003. A complete kinship-based network linking households is created, and distance matrices are also constructed to model spatial relationships. A spatial error-social effects model tested for cholera clustering in socially linked households while accounting for spatial factors. Results show that there was social clustering in five out of twenty-one years while accounting for both known and unknown environmental variables. This suggests that environmental cholera transmission is significant and social networks also influence transmission, but not as consistently. Simultaneous spatial and social network analysis may improve understanding of disease transmission.
本研究同时运用社会网络和空间分析方法来了解孟加拉国农村地区的霍乱传播情况。这两种方法此前曾分别用于将背景因素纳入健康研究，但将它们结合起来使用是一种新的且最近才出现的方法。数据包括一个空间参照的纵向人口数据库，涵盖约20万人，以及一个1983年至2003年所有实验室确诊霍乱病例的数据库。创建了一个基于亲属关系的完整家庭联系网络，还构建了距离矩阵以模拟空间关系。一个空间误差 - 社会效应模型在考虑空间因素的同时，对社会关联家庭中的霍乱聚集情况进行了测试。结果表明，在考虑已知和未知环境变量的情况下，21年中有5年存在社会聚集现象。这表明环境因素对霍乱传播具有重要影响，社会网络也会影响传播，但并非始终如此。同时进行空间和社会网络分析可能会增进对疾病传播的理解。
