The spatio-temporal analysis of infectious diseases

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Infectious diseases are of great importance across society. Epidemic outbreaks of diseases such as measles, SARS, influenza or foot-and-mouth disease, can pose direct threats to public health and/or have serious economic effects. In order to control such diseases, it is vital to understand how the disease spreads geographically over time, and what factors lead to some individuals becoming infected, and some not. To this end, a new class of mathematical models, individual-level models (ILMs) for infectious diseases, has been developed. These models are intuitive, flexible, and have been shown to accurately describe the patterns of previously observed epidemics over space and time. However, ILMs are relatively new and so there are many infectious disease problems for which specific models do not yet exist.