Callender Highlander, Hannah

Price, Owen

English

ISU ReD: Research and eData

Presentation for the Symposium on BEER October 2019Using Agent-Based Modeling to Investigate theExistence of Herd Immunity Thresholds for InfectiousDiseases on Randomly Generated Contact NetworksHannah Callender Highlander1,*, Owen Price1, Emma Soriano1, Caelan Thomas21Department of Mathematics, University of Portland, Portland, OR 972032Shiley School of Engineering, University of Portland, Portland, OR 97203highland@up.eduInfectious diseases pose a serious threat to humans, plants, and animals. Though vaccines can help controloutbreaks of infectious diseases, there is typically not enough vaccine available for the entire population. Inthis case, certain vaccination strategies can be employed to maximize the benefits for the entire population.Using results from graph theory and the simulation tool IONTW (Infections On NeTWorks), we investi-gated the effect of vaccinations on certain types of so-called contact networks that model the patterns ofinteractions within a population. In particular, we focused on a certain class of contact networks knownas small world models, where individuals are randomly connected, i.e., can transmit and/or contract aninfectious disease, along paths that are relatively small in relation to the overall population. These typesof networks tend to provide good estimations of the interactions of real populations when the exact contactnetwork is unknown. However, the complexity and stochasticity of such networks create challenges in deter-mining the best vaccination strategy and how many vaccines should be deployed. We will discuss our resultson how we used ABMs to investigate the existence of a herd immunity threshold, which is a fixed percent-age of the population that we can vaccinate to minimize the possibility of major outbreaks of a given disease.Keywords: Infectious diseases, agent-based modeling, herd immunity threshold, small-world networks, Net-Logo, undergraduate research

Using Agent-Based Modeling to Investigate the Existence of Herd Immunity Thresholds for Infectious Diseases on Randomly Generated Contact Networks

https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1348&context=beer

Using Agent-Based Modeling to Investigate the Existence of Herd Immunity Thresholds for Infectious Diseases on Randomly Generated Contact Networks

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ISU ReD: Research and eData