Using Data on Social Contacts to Estimate Age-specific Transmission Parameters for Respiratory-spread Infectious Agents

The estimation of transmission parameters has been problematic for diseases that rely predominantly on transmission of pathogens from person to person through small infectious droplets. Age-specific transmission parameters determine how such respiratory agents will spread among different age groups in a human population. Estimating the values of these parameters is essential in planning an effective response to potentially devastating pandemics of smallpox or influenza and in designing control strategies for diseases such as measles or mumps. In this study, the authors estimated age-specific transmission parameters by augmenting infectious disease data with auxiliary data on self-reported numbers of…