Related papers: Understanding the Origins of a Pandemic Virus
Reputed intractable, the question of the origin of viruses has long been neglected. In the modern literature 'Virus evolution' has come to refer to study more akin to population genetics, such as the world-wide scrutiny on new polymorphisms…
Infectious diseases cause more than 13 million deaths a year, worldwide. Globalization, urbanization, climate change, and ecological pressures have significantly increased the risk of a global pandemic. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic-the…
Influenza has been circulating in the human population and has caused three pandemics in the last century (1918 H1N1, 1957 H2N2, 1968 H3N2). The 2009 A(H1N1) was classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the fourth pandemic.…
In March and early April 2013, a new avian-origin influenza A (H7N9) virus (A-OIV) emerged in the eastern China. During the first week of April, the 18 infection cases have been confirmed and 6 people have died since March. This virus has…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
Infectious diseases occur when pathogens from other individuals or animals infect a person, resulting in harm to both individuals and society as a whole. The outbreak of such diseases can pose a significant threat to human health. However,…
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
Evidence-based knowledge of infectious disease burden, including prevalence, incidence, severity and transmission, in different population strata and locations, and possibly in real time, is crucial to the planning and evaluation of public…
We study the problem of estimating the origin of an epidemic outbreak -- given a contact network and a snapshot of epidemic spread at a certain time, determine the infection source. Finding the source is important in different contexts of…
Infectious disease outbreaks have precipitated a profusion of mathematical models. Epidemic curves predicted by these models are typically qualitatively similar, despite distinct model assumptions, but there is no theoretical explanation…
It is well known that behavioral changes in contact patterns may significantly affect the spread of an epidemic outbreak. Here we focus on simple endemic models for recurrent epidemics, by modelling the social contact rate as a function of…
This article reviews quantitative methods to estimate the basic reproduction number of pandemic influenza, a key threshold quantity to help determine the intensity of interventions required to control the disease. Although it is difficult…
The epidemic spreading of a disease can be described by a contact network whose nodes are persons or centers of contagion and links heterogeneous relations among them. We provide a procedure to identify multiple sources of an outbreak or…
Identifying viral pathogens and characterizing their transmission is essential to developing effective public health measures in response to a pandemic. Phylogenetics, though currently the most popular tool used to characterize the likely…
For nearly a century, the initial reproduction number (R0) has been used as a one number summary to compare outbreaks of infectious disease, yet there is no `standard' estimator for R0. Difficulties in estimating R0 arise both from how a…
Viral zoonoses have emerged as the key drivers of recent pandemics. Human infection by zoonotic viruses are either spillover events -- isolated infections that fail to cause a widespread contagion -- or species jumps, where successful…
In this paper, the authors aim to find out the origin of the corona and the duration of the present pandemic caused by it. Besides, they aim to find out the reason for such outbreaks occurring often in China. They make a hypothesis that the…
Pandemics have the potential to cause immense disruption and damage to communities and societies. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model to determine how the pandemic spread through the world. The model combines the SEIR-based model for…
Early detection of person-to-person transmission of emerging infectious diseases such as avian influenza is crucial for containing pandemics. We developed a simple permutation test and its refined version for this purpose. A simulation…
H1N1 influenza causes substantial seasonal illness and was the subtype of the 2009 influenza pandemic. Precise measures of antigenic distance between the vaccine and circulating virus strains help researchers design influenza vaccines with…