The Long-Term Effectiveness of Methadone Maintenance Treatment in Prevention of Hepatitis C Virus Among Illicit Drug Users : A Modeling Study

Article Accepted Date: Oct 7, 2013 Acknowledgments: We would like to thank all MMT centers' staff in Shiraz for their cooperation in this study. Funding Support: This study was funded and supported by the Tehran University of Medical Sciences.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Recoverable prevalence in growing scale-free networks and the effective immunization

We study the persistent recoverable prevalence and the extinction of computer viruses via e-mails on a growing scale-free network with new users, which structure is estimated form real data. The typical phenomenon is simulated in a realistic model with the probabilistic execution and detection of viruses. Moreover, the conditions of extinction by random and targeted immunizations for hubs are derived through bifurcation analysis for simpler models by using a mean-field approximation without the connectivity correlations. We can qualitatively understand the mechanisms of the spread in linearly growing scale-free networks.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Update version after helpful referee comment

Selfish Response to Epidemic Propagation

An epidemic spreading in a network calls for a decision on the part of the network members: They should decide whether to protect themselves or not. Their decision depends on the trade-off between their perceived risk of being infected and the cost of being protected. The network members can make decisions repeatedly, based on information that they receive about the changing infection level in the network. We study the equilibrium states reached by a network whose members increase (resp. decrease) their security deployment when learning that the network infection is widespread (resp. limited). Our main finding is that the equilibrium level of infection increases as the learning rate of the members increases. We confirm this result in three scenarios for the behavior of the members: strictly rational cost minimizers, not strictly rational, and strictly rational but split into two response classes. In the first two cases, we completely characterize the stability and the domains of attraction of the equilibrium points, even though the first case leads to a differential inclusion. We validate our conclusions with simulations on human mobility traces.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro