University of New Hampshire Scholars\u27 Repository
Abstract
A nosocomial infection is an infection that a patient develops while in a hospital or healthcare related setting, also known as a hospital acquired infection (HAI).This project has two foci: firstly to model a HAI within an individual, then secondly to understand community-level propagation effects of a nosocomial infection within a hospital ward. An analysis of a novel system of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations (representing the HAI attack and immune response within an individual) was first completed. More specifically the model includes an s parameter that allows frailty to be patient specific. After the dynamic behaviors of the model were fully characterized, an agent based-modeling approach was used to understand community level dynamics. Of particular interest was the interplay between the time span of an infection and the distribution of immune responses across agents[1]
