Robin Wood

This is the one thing SRK can do to stop Uorfi’s antics…

Pandya’s ego strikes again… allegedly.

Imagine sitting down for a chat with Shah Rukh Khan for five hours. Having chai with him while you pick his brain. What would you talk to him about?

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Shama Sikander shared a troubling experience from an ad shoot…

That’s really generous!

Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, the dream couple from the Bollywood IT circuit, have captured hearts with their fairy-tale romance.

Filmmaker Kiran Rao hopes to receive the ultimate recognition as she dreams of Laapataa Ladies at the Oscars.

Sputum-based diagnostics have held centre stage over the past century but recent detection of TB-causing bacteria in people’s breath challenges the current transmission paradigm.

Background: Transmission of respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 depends on patterns of contact and mixing across populations. Understanding this is crucial to predict pathogen spread and the effectiveness of control efforts. Most analyses of contact patterns to date have focused on high-income settings. Methods: Here, we conduct a systematic review and individual-participant meta-analysis of surveys carried out in low- and middle-income countries and compare patterns of contact in these settings to surveys previously carried out in high-income countries. Using individual-level data from 28,503 participants and 413,069 contacts across 27 surveys, we explored how contact characteristics (number, location, duration, and whether physical) vary across income settings. Results: Contact rates declined with age in high- and upper-middle-income settings, but not in low-income settings, where adults aged 65+ made similar numbers of contacts as younger individuals and mixed with all age groups. Across all settings, increasing household size was a key determinant of contact frequency and characteristics, with low-income settings characterised by the largest, most intergenerational households. A higher proportion of contacts were made at home in low-income settings, and work/school contacts were more frequent in high-income strata. We also observed contrasting effects of gender across income strata on the frequency, duration, and type of contacts individuals made. Conclusions: These differences in contact patterns between settings have material consequences for both spread of respiratory pathogens and the effectiveness of different non-pharmaceutical interventions. Funding: This work is primarily being funded by joint Centre funding from the UK Medical Research Council and DFID (MR/R015600/1).