INVESTIGADORES
APARICIO Juan Pablo
artículos
Título:
Building epidemiological models from R_0: an implicit treatment of transmission in networks
Autor/es:
JUAN PABLO APARICIO, MERCEDES PASCUAL
Revista:
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. SERIES B: BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES.
Editorial:
Royal Society
Referencias:
Lugar: Londres; Año: 2007 p. 505 - 512
ISSN:
0962-8452
Resumen:
Simple deterministic models are still at the core of theoretical epidemiology despite the increasing evidencefor the importance of contact networks underlying transmission at the individual level. These mean-field or?compartmental? models based on homogeneous mixing have made, and continue to make, importantcontributions to the epidemiology and the ecology of infectious diseases but fail to reproduce many of thefeatures observed for disease spread in contact networks. In this work, we show that it is possible toincorporate the important effects of network structure on disease spread with a mean-field model derivedfrom individual level considerations. We propose that the fundamental number known as the basicreproductive number of the disease, R0, which is typically derived as a threshold quantity, be used insteadas a central parameter to construct the model from. We show that reliable estimates of individual levelparameters can replace a detailed knowledge of network structure, which in general may be difficult toobtain. We illustrate the proposed model with small world networks and the classical example ofsusceptible?infected?recovered (SIR) epidemics.