Locally self-organized quasi-critical percolation in a multiple disease model
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
2012-06-29 v1 Biological Physics
Abstract
Diseases emerge, persist and vanish in an ongoing battle for available hosts. Hosts, on the other hand, defend themselves by developing immunity that limits the ability of pathogens to reinfect them. We here explore a multi-disease system with emphasis on mutual exclusion. We demonstrate that such a system develops towards a steady state, where the spread of individual diseases self-organizes to a state close to that of critical percolation, without any global control mechanism or separation of time scale. For a broad range of introduction rates of new diseases, the likelihood of transmitting diseases remains approximately constant.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1107.0528,
title = {Locally self-organized quasi-critical percolation in a multiple disease model},
author = {Jeppe Juul and Kim Sneppen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.0528},
year = {2012}
}