Patterns of human social contact and contact with animals in Shanghai, China

Zhang, Juanjuan and Klepac, Petra and Read, Jonathan and Rosello, Alicia and Wang, Xiling and Lai, Shengjie and Li, Meng and Song, Yujian and Wei, Qingzhen and Jiang, Hao and Yang, Juan and Lynn, Henry and Flasche, Stefan and Jit, Mark and Yu, Hongjie (2019) Patterns of human social contact and contact with animals in Shanghai, China. Scientific Reports, 9: 15141. ISSN 2045-2322

Text (Zhang 2019 Scientific Reports)
Zhang_2019_Scientific_Reports.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (4MB)

Abstract

East Asia is as a principal hotspot for emerging zoonotic infections. Understanding the likely pathways for their emergence and spread requires knowledge on human-human and human-animal contacts, but such studies are rare. We used self-completed and interviewer-completed contact diaries to quantify patterns of these contacts for 965 individuals in 2017/2018 in a high-income densely-populated area of China, Shanghai City. Interviewer-completed diaries recorded more social contacts (19.3 vs. 18.0) and longer social contact duration (35.0 vs. 29.1 hours) than self-reporting. Strong age-assortativity was observed in all age groups especially among young participants (aged 7–20) and middle aged participants (25–55 years). 17.7% of participants reported touching animals (15.3% (pets), 0.0% (poultry) and 0.1% (livestock)). Human-human contact was very frequent but contact with animals (especially poultry) was rare although associated with frequent human-human contact. Hence, this densely populated area is more likely to act as an accelerator for human-human spread but less likely to be at the source of a zoonosis outbreak. We also propose that telephone interview at the end of reporting day is a potential improvement of the design of future contact surveys.