Search

Individual behavioral response to the spreading of an epidemic plays a crucial role in the progression of the epidemic itself. The risk perception induces individuals to adopt a protective behavior, as for instance reducing their social contacts, adopting more restrictive hygienic measures or undergoing prophylaxis procedures. In this paper, starting with a previously developed lattice-gas SIR model, we construct a coupled behavior-disease model for influenza spreading with spontaneous behavioral changes. The focus is on self-initiated behavioral changes that alter the susceptibility to the disease, without altering the contact patterns among individuals. Three different mechanisms of awareness spreading are analyzed: the local spreading due to the presence in the neighborhood of infective individuals; the global spreading due to the news published by the mass media and to educational campaigns implemented at institutional level; the local spreading occurring through the “thought contagion” among aware and unaware individuals. The peculiarity of the present approach is that the awareness spreading model is calibrated on available data on awareness and concern of the population about the risk of contagion. In particular, the model is validated against the A(H1N1) epidemic outbreak in Italy during the season, by making use of the awareness data gathered by the behavioral risk factor surveillance system (PASSI). We find that, increasing the accordance between the simulated awareness spreading and the PASSI data on risk perception, the agreement between simulated and experimental epidemiological data improves as well. Furthermore, we show that, within our model, the primary mechanism to reproduce a realistic evolution of the awareness during an epidemic, is the one due to globally available information. This result highlights how crucial is the role of mass media and educational campaigns in influencing the epidemic spreading of infectious diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess the validity and reproducibility of food and nutrient intake estimated with the electronic diet history of ENRICA (DH-E), which collects information on numerous aspects of the Spanish diet. Methods: The validity of food and nutrient intake was estimated using Pearson correlation coefficients between the DH-E and the mean of seven 24-hour recalls collected every 2 months over the previous year. The reproducibility was estimated using intraclass correlation coefficients between two DH-E made one year apart. Results: The correlations coefficients between the DH-E and the mean of seven 24-hour recalls for the main food groups were cereals (r = 0.66), meat (r = 0.66), fish (r = 0.42), vegetables (r = 0.62) and fruits (r = 0.44). The mean correlation coefficient for all 15 food groups considered was 0.53. The correlations for macronutrients were: energy (r = 0.76), proteins (r = 0.58), lipids (r = 0.73), saturated fat (r = 0.73), monounsaturated fat (r = 0.59), polyunsaturated fat (r = 0.57), and carbohydrates (r = 0.66). The mean correlation coefficient for all 41 nutrients studied was 0.55. The intraclass correlation coefficient between the two DH-E was greater than 0.40 for most foods and nutrients. Conclusions: The DH-E shows good validity and reproducibility for estimating usual intake of foods and nutrients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]