Understanding individual decisions in a world where communications and information move instantly via cell phones and the internet, contributes to the development and implementation of policies aimed at stopping or ameliorating the spread of diseases. In this manuscript, the role of official social network perturbations generated by public health officials to slow down or stop a disease outbreak are studied over distinct classes of static social networks. The dynamics are stochastic in nature with individuals (nodes) being assigned fixed levels of education or wealth. Nodes may change their epidemiological status from susceptible, to infected and to recovered. Most importantly, it is assumed that when the prevalence reaches a pre-determined threshold level, P*, information, called awareness in our framework, starts to spread, a process triggered by public health authorities. Information is assumed to spread over the same static network and whether or not one becomes a temporary informer, is a function of his/her level of education or wealth and epidemiological status. Stochastic simulations show that threshold selection P* and the value of the average basic reproduction number impact the final epidemic size differentially. For the Erdős-Rényi and Small-world networks, an optimal choice for P* that minimize the final epidemic size can be identified under some conditions while for Scale-free networks this is not case.
ObjectiveChlamydia trachomatis (Ct) is the most commonly reported sexually transmitted infection in the USA and causes important reproductive morbidity in women. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend routine screening of sexually active women under age 25 but not among men. Despite three decades of screening women, chlamydia prevalence in women remains high. Untested and untreated men can serve as a reservoir of infection in women, and male-screening based intervention can be an effective strategy to reduce infection in women. We assessed the impact of screening men on the Ct prevalence in women.DesignWe created an individual-based network model to simulate a realistic chlamydia epidemic on sexual contact networks for a synthetic population (n=5000). The model is calibrated to the ongoing routine screening among African American (AA) women in the USA and detailed a male-screening programme, Check It, that bundles best practices for Ct control. We used sensitivity analysis to quantify the relative importance of each intervention component.SettingCommunity-based venues in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.ParticipantsHeterosexual AA men, aged 15 to 24, who had sex with women in the past 2 months.InterventionVenue-based screening, expedited index treatment, expedited partner treatment and rescreening.ResultsWe estimate that by annually screening 7.5% of the AA male population in the age-range, the chlamydia prevalence would be reduced relatively by 8.1% (95% CI 5.9% to 10.4%) in AA women and 8.8% (95% CI 6.9% to 10.8%) in AA men. Each man screened could prevent 0.062 (95% CI 0.030 to 0.094) cases in men and 0.204 (95% CI 0.143 to 0.267) cases in women. The model suggested the importance of intervention components ranked from high to low as venue-based screening, expedited index treatment, expedited partner treatment and rescreening.ConclusionThe findings indicated that male-screening has the potential to substantially reduce the prevalence among women in high-prevalence communities.
The relationship between division of labor and individuals' spatial behavior in social insect colonies provides a useful context to study how social interactions influence the spreading of agent (which could be information or virus) across distributed agent systems. In social insect colonies, spatial heterogeneity associated with variations of individual task roles, affects social contacts, and thus the way in which agent moves through social contact networks. We used an Agent Based Model (ABM) to mimic three realistic scenarios of agent spreading in social insect colonies. Our model suggests that individuals within a specific task interact more with consequences that agent could potentially spread rapidly within that group, while agent spreads slower between task groups. Our simulations show a strong linear relationship between the degree of spatial heterogeneity and social contact rates, and that the spreading dynamics of agents follow a modified nonlinear logistic growth model with varied transmission rates for different scenarios. Our work provides an important insights on the dual-functionality of physical contacts. This dual-functionality is often driven via variations of individual spatial behavior, and can have both inhibiting and facilitating effects on agent transmission rates depending on environment. The results from our proposed model not only provide important insights on mechanisms that generate spatial heterogeneity, but also deepen our understanding of how social insect colonies balance the benefit and cost of physical contacts on the agents' transmission under varied environmental conditions. Network models of social insect colonies via local interactions have focused primarily for the spread of three main classes of agents: information, food, and pathogens. In the context of information spreading, colonies should theoretically be organized in a way that allows individuals to transmit relevant information as quickly and accurately as possible [16]. On the other hand, the rapid development of network contacts is problematic to the control and regulation of pathogen spread through contagious interactions [48,23]. Social insects colonies rely on social interactions to balance the need for distribution of useful sources efficiently and the demand to minimize the threat of pathogen spreading by contagious infection through interactions. Kappeler et al. [27] show that the division of a network into subgroups with higher connectivity can inhibit the initial spreading of contagion through social networks, while may rapidly increase spreading within network subgroups or clusters. Task fidelity, shown as a stable and individual pattern of spatial occupancy age-induced, could contribute to this network structure [32]. Thus, it is important to understand the connection between individual interactions in relation to work demand, and their influences on the spreading of other information (or pathogens) through the entire colony.Workers of social insect colonies differentially distribute themselves across col...
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