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Capturing Household Structure and Mobility within and between Remote Aboriginal Communities in Northern Australia Using Longitudinal Data: A Pilot Study

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posted on 2023-07-11, 04:45 authored by Jessie J Goldsmith, Patricia T Campbell, Juan Pablo Villanueva-Cabezas, Rebecca ChisholmRebecca Chisholm, Melita McKinnon, George G Gurruwiwi, Roslyn G Dhurrkay, Alfred M Dockery, Nicholas Geard, Steven YC Tong, Jodie McVernon, Katherine B Gibney
Cultural practices and development level can influence a population’s household structures and mixing patterns. Within some populations, households can be organized across multiple dwellings. This likely affects the spread of infectious disease through these communities; however, current demographic data collection tools do not record these data. Methods: Between June and October 2018, the Contact And Mobility Patterns in remote Aboriginal Australian communities (CAMP-remote) pilot study recruited Aboriginal mothers with infants in a remote northern Australian community to complete a monthly iPad-based contact survey. Results: Thirteen mother–infant pairs (participants) completed 69 study visits between recruitment and the end of May 2019. Participants reported they and their other children slept in 28 dwellings during the study. The median dwelling occupancy, defined as people sleeping in the same dwelling on the previous night, was ten (range: 3.5–25). Participants who completed at least three responses (n = 8) slept in a median of three dwellings (range: 2–9). Each month, a median of 28% (range: 0–63%) of the participants travelled out of the community. Including these data in disease transmission models amplified estimates of infectious disease spread in the study community, compared to models parameterized using census data. Conclusions: The lack of data on mixing patterns in populations where households can be organized across dwellings may impact the accuracy of infectious disease models for these communities and the efficacy of public health actions they inform.

Funding

This research was funded by National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), grant number APP1098319, and the University of Melbourne.

History

Publication Date

2022-09-22

Journal

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Volume

19

Issue

19

Article Number

12002

Pagination

20p.

Publisher

MDPI

ISSN

1660-4601

Rights Statement

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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