Related papers: Ebola transmission dynamics: will future Ebola out…
Dengue is one of the major international public health concerns. Although progress is underway, developing a vaccine against the disease is challenging. Thus, the main approach to fight the disease is vector control. A model for the…
We have further extended our compartmental model describing the spread of the infection in Italy. The model is based on the assumption that the time evolution of all of the observable quantities (number of people still positive to the…
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…
Understanding dynamics of an infectious disease helps in designing appropriate strategies for containing its spread in a population. Recent mathematical models are aimed at studying dynamics of some specific types of infectious diseases. In…
We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…
Epidemic spreading can be suppressed by the introduction of containment measures such as social distancing and lock downs. Yet, when such measures are relaxed, new epidemic waves and infection cycles may occur. Here we explore this issue in…
Recent outbreaks of Ebola, H1N1 and other infectious diseases have shown that the assumptions underlying the established theory of epidemics management are too idealistic. For an improvement of procedures and organizations involved in…
Early estimates of the transmission potential of emerging and re-emerging infections are increasingly used to inform public health authorities on the level of risk posed by outbreaks. Existing methods to estimate the reproduction number…
Up to now, the effects of having heterogeneous networks of contacts have been studied mostly for diseases which are not persistent in time, i.e., for diseases where the infectious period can be considered very small compared to the lifetime…
As offered by the World Health Organisation (WHO), close to half of the population in the world's resides in dengue-risk zones. Dengue viruses are transmitted to individuals by Aedes mosquito species infected bite (Ae. Albopictus of Ae.…
How to prevent the spread of human diseases is a great challenge for the scientific community and so far there are many studies in which immunization strategies have been developed. However, these kind of strategies usually do not consider…
Understanding how epidemics spread in a system is a crucial step to prevent and control outbreaks, with broad implications on the system's functioning, health, and associated costs. This can be achieved by identifying the elements at higher…
The emergence of diseases such as Zika and Ebola has highlighted the need to understand the role of sexual transmission in the spread of diseases with a primarily non-sexual transmission route. In this paper we develop a number of…
In this paper we describe the dynamics of a vector-borne relapsing disease, such as tick-borne relapsing fever, using the methods of compartmental models. After some motivation, model description, and a brief overview of the theory of…
Mutations sometimes increase contagiousness for evolving pathogens. During an epidemic, scientists use viral genome data to infer a shared evolutionary history and connect this history to geographic spread. We propose a model that directly…
The success of an infectious disease to invade a population is strongly controlled by the population's specific connectivity structure. Here a network model is presented as an aid in understanding the role of social behavior and…
We consider the class of SIS epidemic models in which a large population of individuals chooses whether to adopt protection or to remain unprotected as the epidemic evolves. For a susceptible individual, adopting protection reduces the…
In this paper, we propose a mathematical model for HIV-1 infection with intracellular delay. The model examines a viral-therapy for controlling infections through recombining HIV-1 virus with a genetically modified virus. For this model,…
We formulate a compartmental model for the propagation of a respiratory disease in a patchy environment. The patches are connected through the mobility of individuals, and we assume that disease transmission and recovery are possible during…