Contingency planning for a deliberate release of smallpox in Great Britain--the role of geographical scale and contact structure.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In the event of a release of a pathogen such as smallpox, which is human-to-human transmissible and has high associated mortality, a key question is how best to deploy containment and control strategies. Given the general uncertainty surrounding this issue, mathematical modelling has played an important role in informing the likely optimal response, in particular defining the conditions under which mass-vaccination would be appropriate. In this paper, we consider two key questions currently unanswered in the literature: firstly, what is the optimal spatial scale for intervention; and secondly, how sensitive are results to the modelling assumptions made about the pattern of human contacts?

Methods

Here we develop a novel mathematical model for smallpox that incorpo

SUBMITTER: House T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2831898 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature