Individual-level modeling for infectious disease spread

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Infectious diseases are of great importance across society. Epidemic outbreaks of diseases such as influenza, human papillomavirus (HPV), SARS, 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 often 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 issues about how to model various infectious disease problems that remain to be resolved.