Quantifying Poverty as a Driver of Ebola Transmission

Mosoka P Fallah, Laura A Skrip, Shai Gertler, Dan Yamin and Alison P Galvani

PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 2015, vol. 9, issue 12, 1-9

Abstract: Background: Poverty has been implicated as a challenge in the control of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Although disparities between affected countries have been appreciated, disparities within West African countries have not been investigated as drivers of Ebola transmission. To quantify the role that poverty plays in the transmission of Ebola, we analyzed heterogeneity of Ebola incidence and transmission factors among over 300 communities, categorized by socioeconomic status (SES), within Montserrado County, Liberia. Methodology/Principal Findings: We evaluated 4,437 Ebola cases reported between February 28, 2014 and December 1, 2014 for Montserrado County to determine SES-stratified temporal trends and drivers of Ebola transmission. A dataset including dates of symptom onset, hospitalization, and death, and specified community of residence was used to stratify cases into high, middle and low SES. Additionally, information about 9,129 contacts was provided for a subset of 1,585 traced individuals. To evaluate transmission within and across socioeconomic subpopulations, as well as over the trajectory of the outbreak, we analyzed these data with a time-dependent stochastic model. Cases in the most impoverished communities reported three more contacts on average than cases in high SES communities (p

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0004260 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article/file?id ... 04260&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pntd00:0004260

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0004260

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosntds ().