
Kacey C ErnstUniversity of Arizona | UA · Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Kacey C Ernst
Doctor of Philosophy
About
168
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2001 - December 2006
Publications
Publications (168)
Background
In recent years, public health has confronted 2 formidable challenges: the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and the enduring threat of climate change. The convergence of these crises underscores the urgent need for resilient solutions. Resilience informatics (RI), an emerging discipline at the intersection of informatics and public health,...
Over the past decade, Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have expanded into urban areas, including Staten Island, New York. While Lyme disease is often researched with a focus on human risk, domestic pets are also at risk of contracting the disease. The present study aims to describe differences in tick exposure, knowledge, attitude, and practices...
Transdisciplinary projects can uncover crucial insights on people’s past and future risk-mitigation behavior. We focus on a novel risk context: increasing health threats from ticks on Staten Island, a New York City borough where the combination of high population density and extensive park systems and green spaces has resulted in a rise in locally-...
Background
Track PCC includes five geographic surveillance sites to conduct standardized population-based surveillance to estimate and track Post-COVID Conditions (PCC) by age, sex, race/ethnicity, geographic area, severity of initial infection, and risk factors among persons with evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection (based on the Council of State and...
Lyme disease transmission dynamics in the northeastern United States vary by context. Periurban regions, including Block Island, RI, have experienced decades of endemic transmission. In urban areas, including Staten Island, a borough in New York City, NY, Lyme disease is an emerging issue. Knowledge, attitudes, and practices around Lyme disease evo...
BACKGROUND
In recent years, public health has confronted 2 formidable challenges: the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and the enduring threat of climate change. The convergence of these crises underscores the urgent need for resilient solutions. Resilience informatics (RI), an emerging discipline at the intersection of informatics and public health,...
Resilience research is attracting increasing attention as stressors such as pandemics and climate change impact normal life worldwide. Informatics tools can play an important role in enhancing resilience of people, communities, and organizations. We present Resilience Informatics as a sub-discipline of resilience research and propose a conceptual f...
Understanding drivers of disease vectors’ population dynamics is a pressing challenge. For short-lived organisms like mosquitoes, landscape-scale models must account for their highly local and rapid life cycles. Aedes aegypti, a vector of multiple emerging diseases, has become abundant in desert population centers where water from precipitation cou...
Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of dengue virus and threatens 3.9 billion people living in many tropical and subtropical countries. Prevention and reduction of dengue and other Aedes -borne viruses, including Zika and chikungunya, requires control of mosquito populations. Community mobilization and input are essential components of vector contr...
Background
Understanding coupled human-environment factors which promote Aedes aegypti abundance is critical to preventing the spread of Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever and dengue viruses. High temperatures and aridity theoretically make arid lands inhospitable for Ae. aegypti mosquitoes, yet their populations are well established in many desert ci...
Background:
Vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 have consistently been shown to reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 disease. However, uptake of boosters has stalled in the United States at less than 20% of the eligible population. The objective of this study was to assess the reasons for not having obtained a bivalent booster within an existing COVID-1...
Citation: Ernst, K.C.; Walker, K.R.; Castro-Luque, A.L.; Schmidt, C.; Joy, T.K.; Brophy, M.; Reyes-Castro, P.; Díaz-Caravantes, R.E.; Encinas, V.O.; Aguilera, A.; et al. Differences in Longevity and Temperature-Driven Extrinsic Incubation Period Correlate with Varying Dengue Risk in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Region. Viruses 2023, 15, 851. https://
Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) are conditions that occur or remain at least 28 days after SARS-CoV-2 infection. While some risk factors for PASC have been identified, little is known about pre-existing conditions that render one susceptible to developing PASC. Data from participants (n = 1224) in a longitudinal COVID-19 cohort study in Ariz...
Antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern driven by antibiotic overuse. Antibiotic stewardship programs are often limited to clinical settings and do little to address non-prescription antibiotic use in community settings. This study investigates the association between non-prescription antibiotic use and healthcare system distrust in...
Background
The Aedes aegypti mosquito is a vector of several viruses including dengue, chikungunya, zika, and yellow fever. Vector surveillance and control are the primary methods used for the control and prevention of disease transmission; however, public health institutions largely rely on measures of population abundance as a trigger for initiat...
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We present a new global analysis using a publicly available database of 933 cities from 38 countries. Our results showe...
Objective:
To describe characteristics of people who experience changes to their menstrual cycle following COVID-19 vaccination.
Design:
Longitudinal study SUBJECTS: We recruited a volunteer sample with and without a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection who enrolled in the Arizona COVID-19 Cohort (CoVHORT) Study and consented to participate in a Repr...
Introduction
AZCOVIDTXT, a bilingual, two-way information sharing platform was created in April of 2020 in response to rising COVID-19 cases in Arizona. The aim of this paper is to delineate the protocol and processes used to develop and disseminate health messaging to serve as guidance for other groups, universities, or public health programs in t...
Timely treatment-seeking behavior can reduce morbidity and mortality due to infectious diseases. Patterns of treatment-seeking behavior can differ by access to health care, and perceptions of disease severity and symptoms. We evaluated the association between self-reported symptoms at last illness and the level of treatment-seeking behaviors. We an...
Understanding scaling relations of social and environmental attributes of urban systems is necessary for effectively managing cities. Urban scaling theory (UST) has assumed that population density scales positively with city size. We present a new global analysis using a publicly available database of 933 cities from 38 countries. Our results showe...
Shifts in activity patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic might have impacted the benefits of outdoor activities for mental health. By leveraging an existing mobile application, we collected self-reported data on daily outdoor activities, emotional well-being, and the influence of COVID-19 on participant's outdoor activity levels during April-July 2...
Given that older Aedes aegypti (L.) mosquitoes typically pose the greatest risk of pathogen transmission, the capacity to age grade wild Ae. aegypti mosquito populations would be a valuable tool in monitoring the potential risk of arboviral transmission. Here, we compared the effectiveness of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to age grade field-col...
Aim
Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Availability of such data has increased exponentially recently with the proliferation of biodiversity databases. However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards have hampered integration among these datab...
Understanding drivers of disease vectors’ population dynamics is a pressing challenge for human health, however, for short-lived organisms like mosquitoes, landscape-scale models must account for the highly local and rapid scale of their life cycle. Aedes aegypti , a vector of multiple emerging diseases, has been increasing in abundance in desert p...
Background
Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, many that have chosen not to be vaccinated have done so because of vaccine hesitancy. This highlights the need for tools that accurately capture the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs towards COVID-19 vaccines, and provide steps toward improving vaccine accepta...
Background
Overnight travel predicts increased likelihood of Plasmodium infection and may introduce parasite strains to new areas, but deviations from routine at-home use of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) during travel are not well studied.
Methods
Cross-sectional data were taken in 2015 from the western Kenyan highlands and lowlands. Hous...
The objective of this study was to investigate the differences in sleep patterns among individuals with and without laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 test results and self-reported measures recalling sleep habits prior to and during the pandemic were collected from May 2020 to March 2021 among 1,848 individu...
Objective
To elucidate the symptoms of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases as compared with laboratory-confirmed negative individuals and to the untested general population among all participants who reported symptoms within a large prospective cohort study.
Setting and design
This work was conducted within the framework of the Arizona CoVHORT, a...
Understanding population dynamics of disease vectors is a pressing challenge for human health. A major challenge is that landscape-level models for organisms like mosquitoes must also account for the highly local scale of their reproductive biology. Aedes aegypti, a vector of multiple emerging diseases, has been increasing in abundance and range in...
Biodiversity contributes to the ecological and climatic stability of the Amazon Basin1,2, but is increasingly threatened by deforestation and fire3,4. Here we quantify these impacts over the past two decades using remote-sensing estimates of fire and deforestation and comprehensive range estimates of 11,514 plant species and 3,079 vertebrate specie...
Background:
Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of flooding events. Although rainfall is highly correlated with mosquito-borne diseases (MBD) in humans, less research focuses on understanding the impact of flooding events on disease incidence. This lack of research presents a significant gap in climate change-driven disease foreca...
Background
The HIV pandemic has caused enormous suffering and loss of life in the last forty years. Currently more than 34 million people have died as a result of HIV infection and over 37 million people are currently living with HIV. There have been tremendous global efforts to address the HIV pandemic and although significant progress has been ma...
Clinical presentation, outcomes, and duration of COVID-19 has ranged dramatically. While some individuals recover quickly, others suffer from persistent symptoms, collectively known as long COVID, or post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). Most PASC research has focused on hospitalized COVID-19 patients with moderate to severe disease. We used da...
Aim: Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and biological scales. Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of biodiversity information aggregated by biodiversity databases (hereafter ‘databases’). However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards of databas...
Most early Bluetooth‐based exposure notification apps use three binary classifications to recommend quarantine following SARS‐CoV‐2 exposure: a window of infectiousness in the transmitter, ≥15 minutes duration, and Bluetooth attenuation below a threshold. However, Bluetooth attenuation is not a reliable measure of distance, and infection risk is no...
Unintended consequences of human behavioral changes induced by governmental and individual responses to COVID-19 risk are yet to be fully realized. Herein, we evaluated changes in outdoor activity patterns during the spring and summer of 2020 vs. 2019 in the Northeast and Midwest United States. We used self-reported data from daily surveys availabl...
Unintended consequences of human behavioral changes induced by governmental and individual responses to COVID-19 risk are yet to be fully realized. Herein, we evaluated changes in outdoor activity patterns during the spring and summer of 2020 vs. 2019 in the Northeast and Midwest United States. We used self-reported data from daily surveys availabl...
Objectives
Levels of knowledge about the sexual transmission of Zika virus are consistently low in populations at risk of a mosquito-borne outbreak, including among women of childbearing age and women who are pregnant or intend to become pregnant. We investigated the effectiveness of sources of public health messaging about sexual transmission to w...
Clinical presentation, outcomes, and duration of COVID-19 has ranged dramatically. While some individuals recover quickly, others suffer from persistent symptoms, collectively known as post-acute sequelae of SAR-CoV-2 (PASC). Most PASC research has focused on hospitalized COVID-19 patients with moderate to severe disease. We used data from a divers...
Accurate diagnosis of potential SARS-CoV-2 infections by symptoms is one strategy for continuing global surveillance, particularly in low-resource communities. We conducted a prospective, population-based cohort study, the Arizona CoVHORT, among Arizona residents to elucidate the symptom profile of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 participants(16.2%)...
This study is a prospective, population-based cohort of individuals with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection and those without past infection through multiple recruitment sources. The main study goal is to track health status over time, within the diverse populations of Arizona and to identify the long-term consequences of COVID-19 on health and well...
Objective
To measure meaningful, local exposure notification adoption without in-app analytics.
Methods
We surveyed app usage via case investigation interviews at the University of Arizona, with a focus on the period from September 9 to November 28, 2020, after automating the issuance of secure codes to verify positive diagnoses within the test re...
Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) is a serious disease in northwest Mexico, particularly in low-income communities. This study aimed to evaluate RMSF-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices in an endemic urban area with a high burden of the disease. A cross-sectional study design using a non-probabilistic household survey was conducted with 4...
Background:
Alternative long-lasting insecticidal net (LLIN) use for purposes other than sleeping protection from mosquitoes is widely debated as a limitation to successful malaria control efforts, yet rarely rigorously studied.
Methods:
A cross-sectional survey of 1217 households in an epidemic highland site and an endemic lowland site in weste...
Background
Bluetooth-based exposure notification apps can supplement manual contact tracing to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Their speed, scalability, and privacy preservation are generally acknowledged, but less exploited are smartphones’ accurate measurement of duration, and ability to automatically calculate risk from multiple inputs.
Methods...
UNSTRUCTURED
Despite unprecedented advances in global access to the Internet via smartphones, barriers remain to engaging hard-to-reach populations in many methods of health research. One potential avenue for conducting qualitative research is via participatory web-based media, including the free, popular social platform WhatsApp. However, despite...
Background
Despite unprecedented advances in worldwide access to the internet via smartphones, barriers to engaging hard-to-reach populations remain in many methods of health research. A potential avenue for conducting qualitative research is via participatory web-based media, including the free, popular social platform WhatsApp. However, despite t...
Vertical transmission, or pathogen transfer from female to offspring, can facilitate the persistence of emerging arboviruses, such as Zika virus (ZIKV), through periods of low horizontal transmission or adverse environmental conditions. We aimed at determining the rate of vertical transmission for ZIKV in its principal vector, Aedes aegypti, and th...
Background:
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) experiences disproportionate burden of cervical cancer incidence and mortality due in part to low uptake of cervical screening, a strategy for prevention and down-staging of cervical cancer. This scoping review identifies studies of interventions to increase uptake of cervical screening among women in the regio...
Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses regarding factors influencing the outcome of biological invasions. He initially posited that nonnative species closely related to native species would be more likely to successfully establish, because they might share adaptations to the local environment (preadaptation hypothesis). However, bas...
Universal "coverage" with long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) is recommended for malaria control in endemic areas, but ownership does not ensure usage. We evaluated relationships between household-level ownership and individual-level usage in western Kenya in 2015. Low-prevalence highland (> 1,500 m) and highly endemic lowland (< 1,200 m) sites...
Background: The Aedes aegypti mosquito is a vector of several viruses including dengue, chikungunya, zika, and yellow fever. Vector surveillance and control are the primary methods used for the control and prevention of disease transmission, however, there is an overreliance on measures of population abundance in surveillance programs as a trigger...
Background: The Aedes aegypti mosquito is a vector of several viruses including dengue, chikungunya, zika, and yellow fever. Vector surveillance and control are the primary methods used for the control and prevention of disease transmission, however, these activities rely on measures of population abundance in surveillance programs as a trigger for...
The Aedes aegypti mosquito is the primary vector of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Infection with the dengue virus alone occurs in an estimated 400 million people each year. Likelihood of infection with a virus transmitted by Ae. aegypti is most commonly attributed to abundance of the mosquito. However, the Arizona-Sonora dese...
Education intervention effectiveness to improve bed net care and repair knowledge or practices is unclear. To assess intervention effectiveness, we systematically reviewed eight peer-reviewed literature databases and 16 malaria organizations (PROSPERO protocol CRD42019123932) using pre-specified combinations of ‘education intervention’, ‘mosquito n...
During the 2016 Zika pandemic in Brazil, women's perceptions of infection risk, ability to adhere to Zika prevention strategies, or access to services following exposure were not emphasized in the public health response. Women in Fortaleza, Brazil, responded to a questionnaire on social factors related to perceived Zika risk and access to health ca...
Aims
We conducted a statewide online survey to understand public knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) related to non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for mosquito-borne diseases and influenza in Arizona.
Method
The survey included knowledge of diseases, major health concerns, and sources of health information and KAP of NPIs for influenza...
Mobile health (mHealth) technologies are increasingly used across health programming including intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention to optimize screening, educational outreach, and linkages to care via telehealth. We systematically evaluated current web-based and mHealth interventions, which include web- or mobile-based delivery methods for p...
Abstract Background Public health literature is replete with evidence on individual and interpersonal indicators of modern contraceptive use. There is, however, limited knowledge regarding healthcare system indicators of modern contraceptive use. This study assessed how the healthcare system influences use of modern contraceptive among women in Gha...
Background:
Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) and long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) are effective for malaria prevention and are designed to provide nearly 5 years of mosquito protection. However, many ITNs and LLINs become damaged and ineffective for mosquito bite prevention within 1 to 2 years in field conditions. Non-adherence to recommended...
Background:
Detection of local dengue transmission requires an aware and engaged medical community, as health care providers are the front line of public health surveillance. To assess the knowledge, attitude, and practice about dengue, an online survey was distributed among Arizona health care providers during 2014 and 2015.
Materials and method...
The mosquito Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti (L.) is the primary vector of dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses in the United States. Surveillance for adult Ae. aegypti is limited, hindering understanding of the mosquito's seasonal patterns and predictions of areas at elevated risk for autochthonous virus transmission. We developed a simple, intuitive e...
Workshops with academic, national and local government, and community stakeholders were held in Kenya (2017) and Indonesia (2018) to understand the role and perceptions of women in vector control and to identify strategies for accelerating involvement of women in sustained support for vector control interventions at multiple levels/sectors.
Swimming pool water ingestion volumes are necessary for assessing infection risk from swimming. Pool water ingestion volumes can be estimated by questionnaire or measuring a chemical tracer in swimmer urine. Questionnaires are often preferred to the chemical tracer method because surveys are less time consuming, but no research exists validating qu...