Prevention Of Infectious Diseases In The Context Of Effective Treatment

Download or read book Prevention of Infectious Diseases in the Context of Effective Treatment written by Sofía Jijón Albán and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis concerns the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, addressing the individuals' dilemma of prevention versus treatment. In particular, we address the decision-making on whether to adopt prevention, to avoid infection during an ongoing epidemic, in a context where efficient treatment is available. We aim to determine whether and under what conditions the voluntary adoption of prevention could avert an epidemic. We build a mathematical model combining a deterministic model, to describe disease transmission at the population level, and a game-theoretic model, to describe decision-making the individual-level. We assume that individuals solve the dilemma of prevention versus treatment by choosing the strategy that benefits them the most, in the long term. First, we study voluntary vaccination against childhood infectious diseases, and apply our findings to measles. Second, we study the voluntary adoption of pre-exposure prophylaxis to avoid HIV infection by individuals at high risk of infection. We calibrate our HIV model to the epidemiology of men who have sex with men in the Paris region. We obtain the probability for an individual to adopt prevention voluntarily, as a function of prevention cost and effectiveness. Our results suggest that epidemic elimination is possible, provided that individuals perceive the relative cost of prevention versus treatment to be low. However, epidemic elimination may be only temporary: once the epidemic is averted, there is no long-term motivation to adopt prevention based on the perceived risk. Thus, active efforts are required to maintain a low perceived cost of prevention.