Conjunction of factors triggering waves of seasonal influenza
- University of Chicago, United States
- Microsoft Research, United States
- Columbia University, United States
Abstract
Using several longitudinal datasets describing putative factors affecting influenza incidence and clinical data on the disease and health status of over 150 million human subjects observed over a decade, we investigated the source and the mechanistic triggers of influenza epidemics. We conclude that the initiation of a pan-continental influenza wave emerges from the simultaneous realization of a complex set of conditions. The strongest predictor groups are as follows, ranked by importance: (1) the host population's socio- and ethno-demographic properties; (2) weather variables pertaining to specific humidity, temperature, and solar radiation; (3) the virus' antigenic drift over time; (4) the host populations land-based travel habits, and; (5) recent spatio-temporal dynamics, as reflected in the influenza wave auto-correlation. The models we infer are demonstrably predictive (area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve 80%) when tested with out-of-sample data, opening the door to the potential formulation of new population-level intervention and mitigation policies.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Defense Sciences Office, DARPA (W911NF1410333)
- Andrey Rzhetsky
National Institutes of Health (R01HL122712)
- Andrey Rzhetsky
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Mark Jit, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Public Health England, United Kingdom
Version history
- Received: July 26, 2017
- Accepted: February 13, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 27, 2018 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 22, 2018 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2018, Chattopadhyay et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Conjunction of factors triggering waves of seasonal influenza
eLife 7:e30756.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30756
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