3 research outputs found
Understanding disease control: influence of epidemiological and economic factors
We present a local spread model of disease transmission on a regular network
and compare different control options ranging from treating the whole
population to local control in a well-defined neighborhood of an infectious
individual. Comparison is based on a total cost of epidemic, including cost of
palliative treatment of ill individuals and preventive cost aimed at
vaccination or culling of susceptible individuals. Disease is characterized by
pre- symptomatic phase which makes detection and control difficult. Three
general strategies emerge, global preventive treatment, local treatment within
a neighborhood of certain size and only palliative treatment with no
prevention. The choice between the strategies depends on relative costs of
palliative and preventive treatment. The details of the local strategy and in
particular the size of the optimal treatment neighborhood weakly depends on
disease infectivity but strongly depends on other epidemiological factors. The
required extend of prevention is proportional to the size of the infection
neighborhood, but this relationship depends on time till detection and time
till treatment in a non-nonlinear (power) law. In addition, we show that the
optimal size of control neighborhood is highly sensitive to the relative cost,
particularly for inefficient detection and control application. These results
have important consequences for design of prevention strategies aiming at
emerging diseases for which parameters are not known in advance