Diarrheal Disease Transmission Modeling

Principal Investigator

Joseph Eisenberg

Co-Investigators

Carl Marrs, Lixin Zhang, Gabriel Trueba, William Cevallos Trujillo, James Trostle, Karen Levy, Alan Hubbard, James Scott, Travis Porco

Funding Sources

National Institutes of Health

About this Project

Although the burden of diarrheal disease resulting from inadequate water quality, sanitation practices, and hygiene remains high, there is little understanding of the integration of these environmental control strategies. In this study we tested a modeling framework designed to capture the interdependent transmission pathways of enteric pathogens.

We used simulation modeling to evaluate the effectiveness of water quality interventions under varying community sanitation and hygiene conditions, explicitly acknowledging that rates of infection depend on numbers of current and past infections. We characterized the specifics of this dependency by explicitly modeling transmission pathways, in effect yielding a dynamic version of the F diagram. Specifically, we determined (1) how the efficacy of water quality interventions depends on the level of both household- and community-level transmission and (2) the conditions under which water quality interventions, hygiene and sanitation improvements, or both are effective in reducing the burden of disease in a community.