Effects of heterogeneous and clustered contact patterns on infectious disease dynamics.

ABSTRACT: The spread of infectious diseases fundamentally depends on the pattern of contacts between individuals. Although studies of contact networks have shown that heterogeneity in the number of contacts and the duration of contacts can have far-reaching epidemiological consequences, models often assume that contacts are chosen at random and thereby ignore the sociological, temporal and/or spatial clustering of contacts. Here we investigate the simultaneous effects of heterogeneous and clustered contact patterns on epidemic dynamics. To model population structure, we generalize the configuration model which has a tunable degree distribution (number of contacts per node) and level of clustering (number of three cliques). To model epidemic dynamics for this class of random graph, we derive a tracta

SUBMITTER: Volz EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3107246 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature