Kim Kiyeon, Ito Kimihito
Division of Bioinformatics, International Institute for Zoonosis Control, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Front Vet Sci. 2022 Jul 28;9:754255. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2022.754255. eCollection 2022.
Age bins are frequently used in serological studies of infectious diseases in wildlife to deal with uncertainty in the age of sampled animals. This study analyzed how age binning and targeted sampling in serological surveillance affect the width of the 95% confidence interval (CI) of the estimated force of infection (FOI) of infectious diseases. We indicate that the optimal target population with the narrowest 95% CI differs depending on the expected FOI using computer simulations and mathematical models. In addition, our findings show that we can substantially reduce the number of animals required to infer transmission risk by tailoring targeted, age-based sampling to specific epidemiological situations.
年龄分组在野生动物传染病血清学研究中经常被用来处理采样动物年龄的不确定性。本研究分析了血清学监测中的年龄分组和针对性采样如何影响传染病估计感染率（FOI）的95%置信区间（CI）宽度。我们通过计算机模拟和数学模型表明，具有最窄95%CI的最佳目标人群因预期的FOI而异。此外，我们的研究结果表明，通过针对特定的流行病学情况进行有针对性的、基于年龄的采样，我们可以大幅减少推断传播风险所需的动物数量。
