A Piece of the Public Health Surveillance Puzzle: Social Contacts among School-Aged Children

Introduction Timely and effective public health decision-making for control and prevention of acute respiratory infectious diseases relies on early disease detection, pathogen properties, and information on contact behavior affecting transmission. However, data on contact behavior are currently limited, and when available are commonly obtained from traditional self-reported contact surveys [1, 2]. Information for contacts among school-aged children is especially limited, even though children frequently have higher attack rates than adults, and schoolrelated transmission is commonly predictive of subsequent community-wide outbreaks, especially for pandemic influenza. Within this context, high-quality data are needed about social contacts. Precise contact estimates can be used in mathematical models to understand infectious disease transmission [3] and better target surveillance efforts. Here we report preliminary data from an ongoing 2year study to collect social contact data on school-aged children and examine the transmission dynamics of an influenza pandemic.