Abstract
In the discussion concerning network interactions above I gave several example of how to use network theory to intervene against the spread of infectious diseases. In general a policy maker would like to lengthen the characteristic path length in the network. In doing so she may intervene by vaccinating individuals with high degree or high betweenness centrality measures. In doing so it makes the structure of the interaction network less able to efficiently spread an infectious disease. There have been many studies that have looked at these types of strategies in real world populations. For instance, I, along with Philip Polgreen and Alberto Segre, look at how allocating a limited amount of vaccine by giving it first to the individuals with highest degree in the network, as opposed to randomly, greatly limits the spread of infectious disease in a hospital. Others use social interaction data to investigate how different vaccination programs change the expected size of epidemics.
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Notes
- 1.
See Polgreen et al. 2010.
- 2.
For example Bansal et al. 2006.
- 3.
Recall the earlier definition of marginal infections as the additional infections that an individual creates in an epidemic outbreak.
- 4.
Of course individuals also care about whether family members and friends are infected but at an overall level it is not a stretch to assume that the primary concern of most individuals is the risk associated with a small subset of individuals close to them.
- 5.
For an example of research on the benefits of closing schools see, Earn et al. 2012.
- 6.
Flu Closings Failing to Keep Schoolchildren at Home, Bosman 2009.
- 7.
As another interesting item regarding this, there are large economic consequences of these school closures largely associated with parents (some of whom are needed healthcare workers) who must stay home from work to attend to their children. For estimates of these effects see, Lempel et al. 2009.
- 8.
A utility function is simply a function that states the amount of total utility derived from consumption choices.
- 9.
The basic set-up of this model is taken from Kremer 1998.
References
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Bosman J (2009) New York Times, 20 May 20 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/nyregion/21kids.html
Earn DJD, He D, Loeb MB, Fonseca K, Lee BE, Dushoff J (2012) Effects of school closure on incidence of pandemic influenza in Alberta, Canada. Ann Inter Med 156(3):173–181 (February 2012)
Kremer M (1998) AIDS: the economic rationale for public intervention. In: Ainsworth M, Fransen L, Over M (eds) Confronting AIDS: evidence from the developing world. The European Commission and the World Bank, Brussels
Lempel H, Epstein JM, Hammond RA (2009) Economic cost and health care workforce effects of school closures in the U.S. PLOS Curr. Influenza (October 2009)
Polgreen PM, Tassier T, Pemmaraju S, Segre AM (2010) Using social networks to prioritize vaccination strategies for healthcare workers. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 31(9):893–900
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Tassier, T. (2013). Strategic Public Health Interventions. In: The Economics of Epidemiology. SpringerBriefs in Public Health. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38120-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38120-1_7
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