Related papers: Ebola transmission dynamics: will future Ebola out…
The spread of Ebola virus in 2014 is unprecedented. The epidemic is still affecting West Africa, exacerbated by extraordinary socioeconomic disadvantages and health system inadequacies. With the aim of understanding, predicting, and control…
Mathematical modelling has successfully been used to provide quantitative descriptions of many viral infections, but for the Ebola virus, which requires biosafety level 4 facilities for experimentation, modelling can play a crucial role.…
The 2014 Ebola virus (EBOV) outbreak in West Africa is the largest outbreak of the genus Ebolavirus to date. To better understand the spread of infection in the affected countries, it is crucial to know the number of secondary cases…
Dynamic models - often deterministic in nature - were used to estimate the basic reproductive number, R_0, of the 2014-5 Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic outbreak in West Africa. Estimates of R_0 were then used to project the likelihood…
${\bf Background:}$ The early growth dynamics of the West African Ebola virus epidemic has been qualitatively different for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. However, it is important to understand these disparate dynamics as trends of a…
Zoonotic diseases spread through pathogens-infected animal carriers. In the case of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), evidence supports that the main carriers are fruit bats and non-human primates. Further, EVD spread is a multi-factorial problem…
When analysing new emerging infectious disease outbreaks one typically has observational data over a limited period of time and several parameters to estimate, such as growth rate, R0, serial or generation interval distribution, latent and…
The 2014 epidemic of the Ebola virus is governed by a genetically diverse viral population. In the early Sierra Leone outbreak, a recent study has identified new mutations that generate genetically distinct sequence clades. Here we find…
A better characterization of the early growth dynamics of an epidemic is needed to dissect the important drivers of disease transmission. We introduce a 2-parameter generalized-growth model to characterize the ascending phase of an outbreak…
The Ebola virus is currently one of the most virulent pathogens for humans. The latest major outbreak occurred in Guinea, Sierra Leonne and Liberia in 2014. With the aim of understanding the spread of infection in the affected countries, it…
We present a method for estimating epidemic parameters in network-based stochastic epidemic models when the total number of infections is assumed to be small. We illustrate the method by reanalyzing the data from the 2014 Democratic…
A modified, deterministic SEIR model is developed for the 2014 Ebola epidemic occurring in the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The model describes the dynamical interaction of susceptible and infected populations,…
Background: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest on record, resulting in over 25,000 total infections and 15,000 total deaths. Mathematical modeling can be used to investigate the mechanisms driving transmission during…
A major Ebola outbreak occurs in West Africa since March 2014, being the deadliest epidemic in history. As an infectious disease epidemiology, Ebola is the most lethal and is moving faster than in previous outbreaks. On 8 August 2014, the…
In early 2014 an outbreak of a slightly mutated Zaire Ebola subtype appeared in West Africa which is less virulent than 1976 and 1994 strains. The numbers of cases per year appear to be ~ 1000 times larger than the earlier strains,…
Drug resistance and strong contacts actually play crucial roles in epidemic spread in complex systems. Nevertheless, neither theoretical model or methodology is proposed to address this. We thus consider an edge-based epidemic spread model…
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information made contact tracing difficult or impractical in…
The unexpected Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 involving the Zaire ebolavirus made clear that other regions outside Central Africa, its previously documented niche, were at risk of future epidemics. The complex transmission…
Towards the end of an infectious disease outbreak, when a period has elapsed without new case notifications, a key question for public health policy makers is whether the outbreak can be declared over. This requires the benefits of a…
In the context of the ongoing Ebola epidemic in DRC, active conflict and community distrust are undermining control efforts, including vaccination strategies. In this paper, we employed an individual-level stochastic structured transmission…