Modeling Large-Scale Epidemics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Basu
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Markov Model ◽  
Simulation Modeling ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Basic Feature ◽  
Risk Of Infection ◽  
Critical Aspect ◽  
Modeling Framework ◽  
Disease Epidemics

Previous chapters ignored a critical aspect of modeling some major diseases: the infectious nature of many diseases. For infectious diseases, the risk of getting the disease is related to how many people are infectious at a given time: the more infectious people in the area, the higher the risk of infection among susceptible people. In a typical Markov model, we can’t account for this basic feature of infectious diseases because the risk of moving from one state (healthy) to another state (diseased) is assumed to be constant. In this chapter, the author introduces a simulation modeling framework that has been used for decades to simulate infectious disease epidemics.

scholarly journals Success of Big Infectious Disease Reimbursement Policy in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 004695802090778
Author(s):  
Kun-xi Nie ◽  
Chan Wang ◽  
Xin-wu Li
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Government Intervention ◽  
Treatment Costs ◽  
Evolution Model ◽  
Reimbursement Policy ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
The Government ◽  
Government Reimbursement

Big infectious diseases do harm to the whole society, and it is highly crucial to control them on time. The major purpose of this article is to theoretically demonstrate that the Chinese government’s intervention in large-scale infectious diseases is successful and efficient. Two potential strategies were considered: strategy 1 was infectious disease without government intervention, and strategy 2 was infectious disease with government intervention. By evolution model, this article illustrates the efficiency of big infectious disease reimbursement policy in China. Without government reimbursement, this article finds that high expenditures accelerate the disease infection. The number of infected persons decreases under big infectious disease reimbursement policy in China. The higher the treatment costs, the more important the government intervention. Big infectious disease reimbursement policy in China can serve as an efficient example to cope with big infectious diseases.

scholarly journals Emerging and Neglected Infectious Diseases: Insights, Advances, and Challenges

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Israel Nii-Trebi
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Emerging Infectious Diseases ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Economic Stability ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
Formidable Challenge ◽  
Significant Burden ◽  
Disease Epidemics

Infectious diseases are a significant burden on public health and economic stability of societies all over the world. They have for centuries been among the leading causes of death and disability and presented growing challenges to health security and human progress. The threat posed by infectious diseases is further deepened by the continued emergence of new, unrecognized, and old infectious disease epidemics of global impact. Over the past three and half decades at least 30 new infectious agents affecting humans have emerged, most of which are zoonotic and their origins have been shown to correlate significantly with socioeconomic, environmental, and ecological factors. As these factors continue to increase, putting people in increased contact with the disease causing pathogens, there is concern that infectious diseases may continue to present a formidable challenge. Constant awareness and pursuance of effective strategies for controlling infectious diseases and disease emergence thus remain crucial. This review presents current updates on emerging and neglected infectious diseases and highlights the scope, dynamics, and advances in infectious disease management with particular focus on WHO top priority emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and neglected tropical infectious diseases.

scholarly journals Harnessing the Potential of Multiomics Studies for Precision Medicine in Infectious Disease

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca A Ward ◽  
Nima Aghaeepour ◽  
Roby P Bhattacharyya ◽  
Clary B Clish ◽  
Brice Gaudillière ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Patient Specific ◽  
Risk Of Infection ◽  
Specific Data ◽  
Omics Technologies ◽  
Preventative Measures ◽  
Increased Risk ◽  
Immune Profiling

Abstract The field of infectious diseases currently takes a reactive approach, treating infections as they present in patients. Although certain populations are known to be at greater risk of developing infection (e.g., immunocompromised), we lack a systems approach to define the true risk of future infection for a patient. Guided by impressive gains in -omics technologies, future strategies to infectious diseases should take a precision approach to infection through identification of patients at intermediate and high-risk of infection and deploy targeted preventative measures (i.e., prophylaxis). The advances of high-throughput immune profiling by multiomics approaches (i.e., transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, proteomics) holds the promise to identify patients at increased risk of infection and enable risk-stratifying approaches to be applied in the clinic. Integration of patient-specific data using machine learning improves the effectiveness of prediction, providing the necessary technologies needed to propel the field of infectious diseases medicine into the era of personalized medicine.

scholarly journals The Right to Liberty in a Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah McWhirter
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Case Law ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Right

The European Convention on Human Rights has given rise to the most extensive and influential case law of any human rights jurisdiction, and the inclusion of an express infectious diseases exception to the right to liberty suggests that its jurisprudence is likely to provide the best available guidance to states on the circumstances in which such measures may be justifiable and lawful. However, this article argues that the principles developed to date are limited in their applicability to the current crisis, and are insufficient for determining the appropriate balance between public health and the right to liberty when seeking to control the spread of a large-scale, highly infectious disease.

scholarly journals The Prediction of Infectious Diseases: A Bibliometric Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (17) ◽  
pp. 6218
Author(s):  
Wenting Yang ◽  
Jiantong Zhang ◽  
Ruolin Ma
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Bibliometric Analysis ◽  
Core Collection ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Status ◽  
The Core

Objective: The outbreak of infectious diseases has a negative influence on public health and the economy. The prediction of infectious diseases can effectively control large-scale outbreaks and reduce transmission of epidemics in rapid response to serious public health events. Therefore, experts and scholars are increasingly concerned with the prediction of infectious diseases. However, a knowledge mapping analysis of literature regarding the prediction of infectious diseases using rigorous bibliometric tools, which are supposed to offer further knowledge structure and distribution, has been conducted infrequently. Therefore, we implement a bibliometric analysis about the prediction of infectious diseases to objectively analyze the current status and research hotspots, in order to provide a reference for related researchers. Methods: We viewed “infectious disease*” and “prediction” or “forecasting” as search theme in the core collection of Web of Science from inception to 1 May 2020. We used two effective bibliometric tools, i.e., CiteSpace (Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA) and VOSviewer (Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) to objectively analyze the data of the prediction of infectious disease domain based on related publications, which can be downloaded from the core collection of Web of Science. Then, the leading publications of the prediction of infectious diseases were identified to detect the historical progress based on collaboration analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence analysis. Results: 1880 documents that met the inclusion criteria were extracted from Web of Science in this study. The number of documents exhibited a growing trend, which can be expressed an increasing number of experts and scholars paying attention to the field year by year. These publications were published in 427 different journals with 11 different document types, and the most frequently studied types were articles 1618 (83%). In addition, as the most productive country, the United States has provided a lot of scientific research achievements in the field of infectious diseases. Conclusion: Our study provides a systematic and objective view of the field, which can be useful for readers to evaluate the characteristics of publications involving the prediction of infectious diseases and for policymakers to take timely scientific responses.

scholarly journals Evolution, revolution and heresy in the genetics of infectious disease susceptibility

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1590) ◽  
pp. 840-849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian V. S. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Disease Susceptibility ◽  
Rare Variants ◽  
Association Studies ◽  
Common Disease ◽  
Genome Wide Association Studies ◽  
Case Control Studies ◽  
Genome Wide

Infectious pathogens have long been recognized as potentially powerful agents impacting on the evolution of human genetic diversity. Analysis of large-scale case–control studies provides one of the most direct means of identifying human genetic variants that currently impact on susceptibility to particular infectious diseases. For over 50 years candidate gene studies have been used to identify loci for many major causes of human infectious mortality, including malaria, tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, bacterial pneumonia and hepatitis. But with the advent of genome-wide approaches, many new loci have been identified in diverse populations. Genome-wide linkage studies identified a few loci, but genome-wide association studies are proving more successful, and both exome and whole-genome sequencing now offer a revolutionary increase in power. Opinions differ on the extent to which the genetic component to common disease susceptibility is encoded by multiple high frequency or rare variants, and the heretical view that most infectious diseases might even be monogenic has been advocated recently. Review of findings to date suggests that the genetic architecture of infectious disease susceptibility may be importantly different from that of non-infectious diseases, and it is suggested that natural selection may be the driving force underlying this difference.

scholarly journals Data science approaches to confronting the COVID-19 pandemic: a narrative review

2021 ◽  
Vol 380 (2214) ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingpeng Zhang ◽  
Jianxi Gao ◽  
Joseph T. Wu ◽  
Zhidong Cao ◽  
Daniel Dajun Zeng
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Disease Surveillance ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Science ◽  
Drug Repurposing ◽  
Epidemiological Studies ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Social Media Analytics ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Disease Epidemics

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than ever, data science has become a powerful weapon in combating an infectious disease epidemic and arguably any future infectious disease epidemic. Computer scientists, data scientists, physicists and mathematicians have joined public health professionals and virologists to confront the largest pandemic in the century by capitalizing on the large-scale ‘big data’ generated and harnessed for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we review the newly born data science approaches to confronting COVID-19, including the estimation of epidemiological parameters, digital contact tracing, diagnosis, policy-making, resource allocation, risk assessment, mental health surveillance, social media analytics, drug repurposing and drug development. We compare the new approaches with conventional epidemiological studies, discuss lessons we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight opportunities and challenges of data science approaches to confronting future infectious disease epidemics. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Data science approaches to infectious disease surveillance’.

scholarly journals The role of textiles as fomites in the healthcare environment: a review of the infection control risk

PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e9790
Author(s):  
Lucy Owen ◽  
Katie Laird
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Infection Control ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Healthcare Worker ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Epidemiological Studies ◽  
Risk Of Infection ◽  
Clinical Environment ◽  
Healthcare Environment

Background Infectious diseases are a significant threat in both healthcare and community settings. Healthcare associated infections (HCAIs) in particular are a leading cause of complications during hospitalisation. Contamination of the healthcare environment is recognised as a source of infectious disease yet the significance of porous surfaces including healthcare textiles as fomites is not well understood. It is currently assumed there is little infection risk from textiles due to a lack of direct epidemiological evidence. Decontamination of healthcare textiles is achieved with heat and/or detergents by commercial or in-house laundering with the exception of healthcare worker uniforms which are laundered domestically in some countries. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for rigorous infection control including effective decontamination of potential fomites in the healthcare environment. This article aims to review the evidence for the role of textiles in the transmission of infection, outline current procedures for laundering healthcare textiles and review studies evaluating the decontamination efficacy of domestic and industrial laundering. Methodology Pubmed, Google Scholar and Web of Science were searched for publications pertaining to the survival and transmission of microorganisms on textiles with a particular focus on the healthcare environment. Results A number of studies indicate that microorganisms survive on textiles for extended periods of time and can transfer on to skin and other surfaces suggesting it is biologically plausible that HCAIs and other infectious diseases can be transmitted directly through contact with contaminated textiles. Accordingly, there are a number of case studies that link small outbreaks with inadequate laundering or infection control processes surrounding healthcare laundry. Studies have also demonstrated the survival of potential pathogens during laundering of healthcare textiles, which may increase the risk of infection supporting the data published on specific outbreak case studies. Conclusions There are no large-scale epidemiological studies demonstrating a direct link between HCAIs and contaminated textiles yet evidence of outbreaks from published case studies should not be disregarded. Adequate microbial decontamination of linen and infection control procedures during laundering are required to minimise the risk of infection from healthcare textiles. Domestic laundering of healthcare worker uniforms is a particular concern due to the lack of control and monitoring of decontamination, offering a route for potential pathogens to enter the clinical environment. Industrial laundering of healthcare worker uniforms provides greater assurances of adequate decontamination compared to domestic laundering, due to the ability to monitor laundering parameters; this is of particular importance during the COVID-19 pandemic to minimise any risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

scholarly journals HLA and Infectious Diseases

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenefer M. Blackwell ◽  
Sarra E. Jamieson ◽  
David Burgner
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Human Leukocyte Antigen ◽  
Molecular Basis ◽  
Selective Pressure ◽  
Human Leukocyte ◽  
Acquired Immunity ◽  
Leukocyte Antigen ◽  
Extreme Variability ◽  
Classical Human Leukocyte Antigen

SUMMARY Following their discovery in the early 1970s, classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA) loci have been the prototypical candidates for genetic susceptibility to infectious disease. Indeed, the original hypothesis for the extreme variability observed at HLA loci (H-2 in mice) was the major selective pressure from infectious diseases. Now that both the human genome and the molecular basis of innate and acquired immunity are understood in greater detail, do the classical HLA loci still stand out as major genes that determine susceptibility to infectious disease? This review looks afresh at the evidence supporting a role for classical HLA loci in susceptibility to infectious disease, examines the limitations of data reported to date, and discusses current advances in methodology and technology that will potentially lead to greater understanding of their role in infectious diseases in the future.

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