Patty Kostkova

Patty Kostkova
University College London | UCL · Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction

Bc MSc PhD Professor

About

271
Publications
91,892
Reads
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3,711
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2002 - August 2012
City, University of London
Position
  • Head of Department
November 2012 - present
University College London
Position
  • Principal Research Associate

Publications

Publications (271)
Article
Full-text available
Large-scale epidemics of arboviruses, such as dengue, have heightened societal awareness regarding the necessity of combating the primary transmission vectors. Equally critical is the identification of environmental conditions and variables that influence vector population dynamics. Aedes aegypti, the primary vector of arboviruses such as dengue an...
Article
Full-text available
In order to slow the spread of COVID-19, on March 23, 2020, a strict lockdown was implemented in the UK. This was followed by alternating periods of less restrictive lockdowns until most public health restrictions were lifted in the summer of 2021. While these measures were necessary, they significantly affected people’s daily activities, lifestyle...
Chapter
Storytelling is a powerful communication and engagement method. Its usage is rooted in ancient practices. The advent of digital technology has made it possible to design interactive digital stories and use them as a mean to deliver the educational content in an engaging and memorable manner. These allow the learners to control the outcome of the st...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction To protect citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic unprecedented public health restrictions were imposed on everyday life in the UK and around the world. In emergencies like COVID-19, it is crucial for policymakers to be able to gauge the public response and sentiment to such measures in almost real-time and establish best practices for...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on society; it changed the way we work, learn, socialise, and move throughout the world. In the United Kingdom, policies such as business closures, travel restrictions, and social distance mandates were implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19 and implemented and relaxed intermittently throughout th...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an “infodemic” of misinformation. Misleading narratives around the virus, its origin, and treatments have had serious implications for public health. In March 2021, concerns were raised about links between the Oxford/AstraZeneca (AZ) COVID-19 vaccine and recipients developing blood clots. This paper aims to...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Mobile technology can deliver public health interventions to reach remote populations such as unique mHealth interventions aimed at low-literacy audiences in low resource settings. This research study assessed a mobile phone-based serious game that teaches geohazard, maternal, and neonatal health messages. This study is part of the Mater...
Preprint
BACKGROUND University students, often living in close quarters and engaging in frequent social interactions, face a heightened risk of influenza morbidity. Yet, vaccination rates among this group, particularly Chinese students, remain consistently low due to limited awareness and insufficient access to vaccinations. OBJECTIVE This study examines t...
Article
Full-text available
Background University students, who often live in close quarters and engage in frequent social interaction, face a heightened risk of influenza morbidity. Still, vaccination rates among this group, particularly Chinese students, remain consistently low due to limited awareness and insufficient access to vaccinations. Objective This study examines...
Article
Full-text available
University students, who face an elevated risk of influenza due to close living quarters and frequent social interactions, often exhibit low vaccine uptake rates. This issue is particularly pronounced among Chinese students, who encounter unique barriers related to awareness and access, emphasizing the need for heightened attention to this problem...
Article
Full-text available
Aims Surgical Antibiotic Prophylaxis (SAP) in Nigeria is often not evidence based. The aim of this study is to test if the GADSA application can change prescription behaviour of surgeons in Nigeria. In addition, the study aims to identify AMS strategies and policies for the future. Methods The GADSA gamified decision support app uses WHO and Sanfo...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aims Surgical Antibiotic Prophylaxis (SAP) in Nigeria is often not evidence based. The aim of this study is to test if the GADSA application can change prescription behaviour of surgeons in Nigeria. In addition, the study aims to identify AMS strategies and policies for the future. Methods The GADSA gamified decision support app uses WHO and Sanfo...
Article
Full-text available
One of the barriers to performing geospatial surveillance of mosquito occupancy or infestation anywhere in the world is the paucity of primary entomologic survey data geolocated at a residential property level and matched to important risk factor information (e.g., anthropogenic, environmental, and climate) that enables the spatial risk prediction...
Article
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Vaccine development against COVID-19 has mitigated severe disease. However, reports of rare but serious adverse events following immunization (sAEFI) in the young populations are fuelling parental anxiety and vaccine hesitancy. With a very early season of viral illnesses including COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, metapneumovi...
Article
Full-text available
This research aims to provide further insight on how to design effective educational games by exploring whether the integration of educational content through game mechanics, text, or a combination of both text and game mechanics is more effective in teaching the learning outcomes in games. The results of the study show that all three methods led t...
Article
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The global priority of improving neonatal survival could be tackled through the universal implementation of cost-effective maternal and newborn health interventions. Despite 90% of neonatal deaths occurring in low-resource settings, very few evidence-based digital health interventions exist to assist healthcare professionals in clinical decision-ma...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The monitoring of environmental parameters is indispensable for controlling mosquito populations. The abundance of mosquitoes mainly depends on climate conditions, weather and water (i.e., physicochemical parameters). Traditional techniques for immature mosquito surveillance are based on remote sensing and weather stations as primary data sources f...
Article
Full-text available
Objective To analyze rates of reported severe adverse events after immunization (sAEFI) attributed to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the United States (US) using safety surveillance data. Methods Observational study of sAEFI reported to the vaccine adverse events reporting system (VAERS) between December 13, 2020, to December 13, 2021, and attributed to S...
Article
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Certain weather conditions are inadvertently related to increased population of various mosquitoes. In order to predict the burden of mosquito populations in the Global South, it is imperative to integrate weather-related risk factors into such predictive models. There are a lot of online open-source weather platforms that provide historical, curre...
Article
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This longitudinal study determines the frequency and way of people doing activities from Spring 2020 to Summer 2021 during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Six online surveys were carried out between April 2020 and July 2021. 4,992 participants were engaged in the cross-sectional study and 203 participants who provided repeat re...
Article
Full-text available
Dwelling fires are attributable to the high public health burden of injury and mortality in England. The statistic shows that from 2010 to 2019, over 5,000 injuries and 200 deaths annually are caused by dwelling fires which accounts for around three-fourths of the total fire-related casualties. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the social risk...
Article
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COVID-19 vaccines have been developed and administered at record pace in order to curtail the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy has impacted uptake unequally across different groups. This study explores the drivers for vaccine hesitancy in ethnic minority groups in the UK, the impact of social media on vaccine hesitancy and how vac...
Article
Full-text available
COVID-19 vaccines have been developed and administered at record pace in order to curtail the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy has impacted uptake unequally across different groups. This study explores the drivers for vaccine hesitancy in ethnic minority groups in the UK, the impact of social media on vaccine hesitancy and how vac...
Article
Full-text available
Arboviruses are a group of diseases that are transmitted by an arthropod vector. Since they are part of the Neglected Tropical Diseases that pose several public health challenges for countries around the world. The arboviruses' dynamics are governed by a combination of climatic, environmental, and human mobility factors. Arboviruses prediction mode...
Article
Full text available at: https://theconversation.com/ai-could-help-us-spot-viruses-like-monkeypox-before-they-cross-over-and-help-conserve-nature-182515 . Short abstract: As we push nature to the fringes, we make the world less safe for both humans and animals. That’s because environmental destruction forces animals carrying viruses closer to us, o...
Article
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Infectious diseases, as COVID-19 is proving, pose a global health threat in an interconnected world. In the last 20 years, resistant infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), H1N1 influenza (swine flu), Ebola virus, Zika virus, and now COVID-19 have been impacting global health de...
Article
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Background In Nigeria, the prescription of surgical antibiotic prophylaxis for prevention of surgical site infection tends to be driven by local policy rather than by published guidelines (e.g. WHO and Sanford). Objectives To triangulate three datasets and understand key barriers to implementation using a behavioural science framework. Methods Su...
Preprint
Full-text available
Infectious diseases, as COVID-19 is proving, pose a global health threat in an interconnected world. In the last 20 years, resistant infectious diseases such as SARS, MERS, H1N1, Ebola, Zika and now COVID-19 have been impacting global health defences, and aggressively flourishing within the rise of global travel, urbanization, climate change and ec...
Article
PurposeDengue is considered one of the biggest public health problems in recent decades. Climate and demographic changes, the disorderly growth of cities and international trade have brought new arboviruses such as chikungunya and Zika. Control of arboviruses depends on control of the vector: the Aedes aegypti mosquito.Objective In this work, we pr...
Chapter
In December 2019 an outbreak of a new disease happened, in Wuhan city, China, in which the symptoms were very similar to pneumonia. The disease was attributed to SARS-CoV-2 as the infectious agent and it was called the new coronavirus or Covid-19. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a worldwide pandemic of the new coronavirus. We...
Chapter
Arboviruses are diseases transmitted by viruses which are maintained in the wild through a vertebrate host and a hematophagous arthropod, such as a mosquito. The transmitter vector of an arbovirus is the arthropod which transmits the virus from one vertebrate to the other through a bite. The biological transmission usually occurs when the hematopha...
Preprint
Full-text available
Purpose: Aedes aegypti is a mosquito responsible for transmitting mainly dengue, zika, and chikungunya. In low- and middle-income countries, controlling the spread of this mosquito poses a major public health challenge. Currently, Aedes aegypti control policies are extremely important for lowering the risk of potential arbovirus outbreaks. One of t...
Article
Full-text available
It is widely acknowledged that vaccine hesitancy is a multifaceted problem that cannot be addressed by a single strategy. Behavior change theories and social media tools may together help to guide the design of interventions aimed at improving vaccination uptake. This systematic review aims to identify the breadth and effectiveness of such theories...
Article
Full-text available
In Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), one of the causes of maternal and child mortality is a lack of medical knowledge and consequently the inability to seek timely healthcare. Mobile health (mHealth) technology is gradually becoming a universal intervention platform across the globe due to ubiquity of mobile phones and network coverage. MANTR...
Article
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Mosquito surveillance is a crucial process for understanding the population dynamics of mosquitoes, as well as implementing interventional programs for controlling and preventing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Environmental surveillance agents who performing routine entomological surveys at properties in areas where mosquito-borne diseases...
Article
Full-text available
During the COVID-19 pandemic, information is being rapidly shared by public health experts and researchers through social media platforms. Whilst government policies were disseminated and discussed, fake news and misinformation simultaneously created a corresponding wave of “infodemics.” This study analyzed the discourse on Twitter in several langu...
Article
Full-text available
Dengue has become a challenge for many countries. Arboviruses transmitted by Aedes aegypti spread rapidly over the last decades. The emergence chikungunya fever and zika in South America poses new challenges to vector monitoring and control. This situation got worse from 2015 and 2016, with the rapid spread of chikungunya, causing fever and muscle...
Article
Full-text available
Dengue has become a challenge for many countries. Arboviruses transmitted by Aedes aegypti spread rapidly over the last decades. The emergence chikungunya fever and zika in South America poses new challenges to vector monitoring and control. This situation got worse from 2015 and 2016, with the rapid spread of chikungunya, causing fever and muscle...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the main factors for mosquito-borne transmission of the Zika virus by focusing on environmental, anthropogenic, and social risks. A literature review was conducted bringing together related information from this genre of research from peer-reviewed publications. It was observed that environmental conditions, especially precipita...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The problem of arboviruses such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and zika has become a growing issue in the Americas in recent years, with Aedes Aegypti being one of the main vectors of this type of disease. Several studies have been carried out to try to understand the dynamics and possible enhancers of the transmission of the mosquito, being...
Article
Full-text available
Background: In order to prevent spread and improve control of infectious diseases, public health experts need to closely monitor human and animal populations. Infectious disease surveillance is an established, routine data collection process essential for early warning, rapid response, and disease control. The quantity of data potentially useful fo...
Article
Full-text available
Engaging citizens with digital technology to co-create data, information and knowledge has widely become an important strategy for informing the policy response to COVID-19 and the 'infodemic' of misinformation in cyberspace. This move towards digital citizen participation aligns well with the United Nations' agenda to encourage the use of digital...
Article
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Background: Digital data sources have become ubiquitous in modern culture in the era of digital technology but often tend to be under-researched because of restricted access to data sources due to fragmentation, privacy issues, or industry ownership, and the methodological complexity of demonstrating their measurable impact on human health. Even th...
Article
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Background: Periodically, humanity is often faced with new and emerging viruses that can be a significant global threat. It has already been over a century post—the Spanish Flu pandemic, and we are witnessing a new type of coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2, which is responsible for Covid-19. It emerged from the city of Wuhan (China) in December 2019, and...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Periodically, humanity is often faced with new and emerging viruses that can be a significant global threat. It has already been over a century post—the Spanish Flu pandemic, and we are witnessing a new type of coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2, which is responsible for Covid-19. It emerged from the city of Wuhan (China) in December 2019, and...
Article
Full-text available
Background Drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) globally and is projected to be responsible for up to a quarter of AMR-associated deaths in the future. Management of DR-TB is increasingly decentralised to primary healthcare settings, and simultaneously becoming more complex due to a growing ra...
Conference Paper
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Article
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Background Hospital antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programmes are multidisciplinary initiatives to optimize antimicrobial use. Most hospitals depend on time-consuming manual audits to monitor clinicians’ prescribing. But much of the information needed could be sourced from electronic health records (EHRs). Objectives To develop an informatics met...
Conference Paper
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Resumo: O SARS-CoV-2, novo tipo de coronavírus, se espalhou para países de todos os continentes do mundo. Esta doença tem como sintomas febre, tosse, dor de garganta e, em casos graves, falta de ar e morte. A predição de números de casos e óbitos pode auxiliar na avaliação das estratégias para a tomada de decisão. Para isso propomos um sistema para...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Resumo—O combate à doença causada pelo novo coronavírus, a Covid-19, tornou-se um grande desafio de saúde pública mundial. Com cerca de 219 países afetados pela pandemia, mais de 42 milhões de casos foram confirmados em todo mundo e mais de 1 milhão de óbitos causados pela doença. O monitoramento e predição da distribuição espacial da doença é esse...
Article
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Gender has received increased attention in disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies and practices over the past three decades. However, a critical analysis raises a number of questions: has the attention to gender brought transformative change to the lives of people, especially women and sexual minorities in all their diversity? To what extent has th...
Article
Full-text available
Serious games, conveying educational knowledge rather than merely entertainment, are a rapidly expanding research domain for cutting-edge educational technology. Digital interventions like serious games are great opportunities to overcome challenges in low-and-middle-income countries that limit access to health information, such as social barriers...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The global burden of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The current spread of Covid-19 in Brazil is problematic causing a huge public health burden to its population and national health-care service. To evaluate strategies for alleviating such problems, it is necessary to forecast the number of cases...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The global burden of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The current spread of Covid-19 in Brazil is problematic causing a huge public health burden to its population and national health-care service. To evaluate strategies for alleviating such problems, it is necessary to forecast the number of cases...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Mobile technology is increasingly important for delivering public health interventions to remote populations. This research study developed, piloted, and assessed a serious game for mobile devices that teaches geohazard, maternal, and neonatal health messages. This unique mHealth intervention aimed at low-literacy audiences in low reso...