Related papers: Using social contact data to improve the overall e…
Seasonal influenza is a significant public health concern in the United States and globally. While influenza vaccines are the single most effective intervention to reduce influenza morbidity and mortality, there is considerable debate…
On 11 June the World Health Organization officially raised the phase of pandemic alert (with regard to the new H1N1 influenza strain) to level 6. We use a global structured metapopulation model integrating mobility and transportation data…
Knowledge of the severity of an influenza outbreak is crucial for informing and monitoring appropriate public health responses, both during and after an epidemic. However, case-fatality, case-intensive care admission and…
Acute respiratory diseases are transmitted over networks of social contacts. Large-scale simulation models are used to predict epidemic dynamics and evaluate the impact of various interventions, but the contact behavior in these models is…
Network-based interventions against epidemic spread are most powerful when the full network structure is known. However, in practice, resource constraints require decisions to be made based on partial network information. We investigated…
Background: Globally, influenza is a major cause of morbidity, hospitalization and mortality. Influenza vaccination has shown substantial protective effectiveness in the United States. We investigated state-level patterns of coverage rates…
Many epidemic models approximate social contact behavior by assuming random mixing within mixing groups (e.g., homes, schools and workplaces). The effect of more realistic social network structure on estimates of epidemic parameters is an…
Background: Network-based interventions are most powerful against epidemics when the full network structure is known. However, resource constraints often require decisions based on partial network data. We investigated how the effectiveness…
The unfolding of pandemic influenza A(H1N1) for Fall 2009 in the Northern Hemisphere is still uncertain. Plans for vaccination campaigns and vaccine trials are underway, with the first batches expected to be available early October. Several…
Recently developed vaccines provide a new way of controlling rotavirus in sub-Saharan Africa. Models for the transmission dynamics of rotavirus are critical both for estimating current burden from imperfect surveillance and for assessing…
We describe methods that extend (generalize or transport) causal inferences from cluster randomized trials to a target population of clusters, under a general nonparametric model that allows for arbitrary within-cluster dependence. We…
This paper develops nonparametric methods for the survival analysis of epidemic data based on contact intervals. The contact interval from person i to person j is the time between the onset of infectiousness in i and infectious contact from…
The vaccination against ongoing epidemics is seldom compulsory but remains one of the most classical means to fight epidemic propagation. However recent debates concerning the innocuity of vaccines and their risk with respect to the risk of…
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…
Surveillance data serving for epidemic alert systems are typically fully aggregated in space. However, epidemics may be spatially heterogeneous, undergoing distinct dynamics in distinct regions of the surveillance area. We unveil this in…
We present a machine learning-based methodology capable of providing real-time ("nowcast") and forecast estimates of influenza activity in the US by leveraging data from multiple data sources including: Google searches, Twitter microblogs,…
Finding optimal policies to reduce the morbidity and mortality of the ongoing pandemic is a top public health priority. Using a compartmental model with age structure and vaccination status, we examined the effect of age specific scheduling…
Interference occurs when a unit's treatment (or exposure) affects another unit's outcome. In some settings, units may be grouped into clusters such that it is reasonable to assume that interference, if present, only occurs between…
The estimation from available data of parameters governing epidemics is a major challenge. In addition to usual issues (data often incomplete and noisy), epidemics of the same nature may be observed in several places or over different…
A central challenge in every field of biology is to use existing measurements to predict the outcomes of future experiments. In this work, we consider the wealth of antibody inhibition data against variants of the influenza virus. Due to…