Related papers: Fitting and projecting HIV epidemics: Data, struct…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
In 2014, a major epidemic of human Ebola virus disease emerged in West Africa, where human-to-human transmission has now been been sustained for greater than 10 months. In the summer of 2014, there was great uncertainty about the answers to…
With the launch of second line anti-retroviral therapy for HIV infected individuals, there has been an increased expectation on surviving period of people with HIV. We consider previously well-known models in HIV epidemiology where the…
The timing of antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation for HIV and tuberculosis (TB) co-infected patients needs to be considered carefully. CD4 cell count can be used to guide decision making about when to initiate ART. Evidence from recent…
This paper uses new and existing methods to study collective trends across countries throughout the pandemic, with a focus on the multivariate time series of reproduction numbers and vaccine proliferation. We begin with a time-varying…
This paper considers the problem of modeling epidemic outbreaks in different regions with a common model, that uses additional information about these regions to adjust its parameters and relieve us of mundanity of data collecting, and…
Understanding the dynamics of the spread of diseases within populations is critical for effective public health interventions. We extend the classical SIR model by incorporating additional complexities such as the introduction of a cure and…
The United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has set a target to ensure that 15 million HIV-positive people in the world would be receiving combination anti-retroviral treatment (ART) by 2015. This target is likely to be reached…
To understand the contact patterns of a population -- who is in contact with whom, and when the contacts happen -- is crucial for modeling outbreaks of infectious disease. Traditional theoretical epidemiology assumes that any individual can…
The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete coverage of…
The spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the pattern of contacts among individuals. Knowledge of these patterns is thus essential to inform models and computational efforts. Few empirical studies are however available that…
To combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic effectively, targeted interventions among certain key populations play a critical role. Examples of such key populations include sex workers, people who inject drugs, and men who have sex with men. While…
Comparative effectiveness evidence from randomized trials may not be directly generalizable to a target population of substantive interest when, as in most cases, trial participants are not randomly sampled from the target population.…
Tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can be considered a deadly human syndemic. In this article, we formulate a model for TB and HIV transmission dynamics. The model considers both TB and acquired immune deficiency…
HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and Wits University, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual…
Evaluating causal effects in the presence of interference is challenging in network-based studies of hard-to-reach populations. Like many such populations, people who inject drugs (PWID) are embedded in social networks and often exert…
The emergence and spread of deadly pandemics has repeatedly occurred throughout history, causing widespread infections and loss of life. The rapid spread of pandemics have made governments across the world adopt a range of actions,…
Reports from the Health Department in the Philippines show that cases of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) are increasing despite management and control efforts by the government. Worldwide, the Philippines has one of the fastest growing…
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) coinfection has become one of the most challenging clinical situations to manage in HIV-infected patients. Recently the effect of HCV coinfection on HIV dynamics following initiation of highly active antiretroviral…
We introduce a new version of forward stepwise regression. Our modification finds solutions to regression problems where the selected predictors appear in a structured pattern, with respect to a predefined distance measure over the…