Ebola could be eradicated through voluntary vaccination

Abstract

Ebola virus disease (EVD) is a severe infection with an extremely high fatality rate spread through direct contact with body fluids. A promising Ebola vaccine (rVSV-ZEBOV) may soon become universally available. We constructed a game-theoretic model of Ebola incorporating individual decisions to vaccinate. We found that if a population adopts selfishly optimal vaccination strategies, then the population vaccination coverage falls negligibly short of the herd immunity level. We concluded that eradication of Ebola is feasible if voluntary vaccination programmes are coupled with focused public education efforts. We conducted uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to demonstrate that our findings do not depend on the choice of the epidemiological model parameters.

A game-theoretic model of Monkeypox to assess vaccination strategies

“…The model is a predictive tool in populations for extracting an optimum decision-making strategy (Chang et al, 2020). Game theory has been applied to protection strategies to control diseases such as smallpox (Bauch, Galvani & Earn, 2003), toxoplasmosis (Sykes & Rychtář, 2015), cholera (Kobe et al, 2018), measles (Shim et al, 2012), rubella (Shim, Kochin & Galvani, 2009), influenza (Galvani, Reluga & Chapman, 2007), African sleeping sickness (Crawford et al, 2015), malaria (Orwa, Mbogo & Luboobi, 2018;Broom, Rychtář & Spears-Gill, 2016), (Zika Padmanabhan, Seshaiyer & Castillo-Chavez, 2017;Banuelos et al, 2019) (Polio Cheng et al, 2020, Ebola (Brettin et al, 2018), chikungunya (SRM Klein, AO Foster, DA Feagins, JT Rowell, IV Erovenko, 2019, unpublished data), meningitis (A Martinez, J Machado, E Sanchez, I Erovenko, 2019, unpublished data), typhoid (C Acosta-Alonzo, IV Erovenko, A Lancaster, H Oh, J Rychtář, D Taylor, 2020, unpublished data), Hepatitis C (Scheckelhoff, Ejaz & Erovenko, 2019) and Hepatitis B (Chouhan et al, in press) among others. In this paper, we apply a similar approach to MPX to investigate a scenario in which individuals have the option of vaccinating to reduce the chance of contracting the virus.…”

Mathematical modeling of contact tracing as a control strategy of Ebola virus disease

“…These people may have been exposed to the infection and do not know it, or they may have acquired the disease pathogen but do not show symptoms [31,48]. Therefore, those individuals in the Q-class who do not show symptoms after 21 days (the maximun latent period for EVD [3,22,55]) will be considered susceptibles [30,63], whereas those who are tested positive will be hospitalized. • U (t): Unidentified individuals who have been in contact with infectives.…”

“…The majority of parameters in Table 2 are mainly obtained from [47,72,80]. In addition, λ u , λ q , p qs , p us , θ, are estimated according to [1,2,22,73,75]. Precisely:…”

A Comparative Study of Challenges and Strategic Management: Lessons Learned from SARS, MERS, HIV & Ebola Outbreaks

“…While there is a vaccine for diphtheria, measles, mumps, pertussis, polio, rubella, smallpox, and influenza, Ebola vaccines, although proven effective, are not being used due to questions on the effectiveness of the vaccine over a long period, and also the vaccination would be costly. Several patients who were tried to be vaccinated in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak refused to vaccinate [25] [26]. There is also no vaccine developed to date for the coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.…”