Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-18-2018
Abstract
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a continued threat to human health in both community and healthcare settings. In hospitals, control efforts would benefit from accurate estimation of asymptomatic colonization and infection importation rates from the community. However, developing such estimates remains challenging due to limited observation of colonization and complicated transmission dynamics within hospitals and the community. Here, we develop an inference framework that can estimate these key quantities by combining statistical filtering techniques, an agent-based model, and real-world patient-to-patient contact networks, and use this framework to infer nosocomial transmission and infection importation over an outbreak spanning 6 years in 66 Swedish hospitals. In particular, we identify a small number of patients with disproportionately high risk of colonization. In retrospective control experiments, interventions targeted to these individuals yield a substantial improvement over heuristic strategies informed by number of contacts, length of stay and contact tracing.
Comments
This article was originally published in eLife, available at DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40977.001.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).