Modeling The Tradeoff Between Transmission And Movement In Infectious Disease Dynamics

Download or read book Modeling the Tradeoff Between Transmission and Movement in Infectious Disease Dynamics written by Kristen Alanna Deger and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transmission of infectious diseases can occur when infected individuals contact healthy individuals. For certain infectious diseases the severity of the infection can be measured by the amount of pathogen an infected individual is shedding, with higher shedding rates corresponding to more severe infections. As pathogen shedding increases the probability of transmission given contact increases. However, symptoms associated with a severe infection may lead to less travel and thus fewer contacts. We examine how this tradeoff between transmission and movement influences infectious disease dynamics. To capture this tradeoff we developed a single strain model for which contact scales with transmissibility. The effect of the tradeoff on the spread of disease was explored by analyzing the basic reproduction number of the model. We determined sufficient conditions for when the basic reproduction number is a monotone increasing function of the probability of transmission. From this analysis we found that the tradeoff in the model allows for non-monotonic behavior of the basic reproduction number. The model was then extended to include two strains of an infectious disease. We examined whether competitive exclusion between the two strains occurs or whether coexistence is possible, and the effect of the tradeoff on strain competition. Numerical results suggest that competitive exclusion always occurs regardless of whether the basic reproduction number is monotone with respect to the probability of transmission.