When the body gets infected by a pathogen or receives a vaccine dose, the
immune system develops pathogen-specific immunity. Induced immunity decays in
time and years after recovery/vaccination the host might become susceptible
again. Exposure to the pathogen in the environment boosts the immune system
thus prolonging the duration of the protection. Such an interplay of within
host and population level dynamics poses significant challenges in rigorous
mathematical modeling of immuno-epidemiology. The aim of this paper is twofold.
First, we provide an overview of existing models for waning of
disease/vaccine-induced immunity and immune system boosting. Then a new
modeling approach is proposed for SIRVS dynamics, monitoring the immune status
of individuals and including both waning immunity and immune system boosting.
We show that some previous models can be considered as special cases or
approximations of our framework.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure keywords: Immuno-epidemiology, Waning immunity,
Immune status, Boosting, Physiological structure, Reinfection, Delay
equations, Vaccination. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1411.319
