Simple visit behavior unifies complex Zika outbreaks

Abstract

New outbreaks of Zika in the U.S. are imminent. Human nature dictates that many individuals will continue to revisit affected ‘Ground Zero’ patches, whether out of choice, work or family reasons − yet this feature is missing from traditional epidemiological analyses. Here we show that this missing visit-revisit mechanism is by itself capable of explaining quantitatively the 2016 human Zika outbreaks in all three Ground Zero patches. Our findings reveal counterintuitive ways in which this human flow can be managed to tailor any future outbreak’s duration, severity and time-to-peak. Effective public health planning can leverage these results to impact the evolution of future outbreaks via soft control of the overall human flow, as well as to suggest best-practice visitation behavior for local residents.

A Survey of Program Capacity and Skills of Florida Mosquito Control Districts to Conduct Arbovirus Surveillance and Control

“…The State of Florida's ability to contain the 2016 ZIKV disease outbreak under relatively low or declining local mosquito-fighting budgets (Ajelli et al 2017, Manrique et al 2017) might be more a testament of programs essentially performing miracles with little than it was about the sufficient capacity of individual programs. In particular, the combined, coordinated federal and state support, including additional federal funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state funding from the Florida Department of Health and FDACS, and efforts that went beyond control activities alone, were critical in limiting the spread of the deadly virus.…”

The Mayaro virus and its potential epidemiological consequences in Colombia: an exploratory biomathematics analysis

“…aegypti, the mathematical models have proven to be useful tools to understand dengue transmission [14,36] and, recently, chikungunya [37] and Zika [38], as well as to help in planning control strategies [39]. Among the different mathematical approaches to study infectious diseases through vectors, as with the Mayaro virus, the SEIR-type (susceptible, exposed, infected and recovered) epidemiological models [40,41] and in metapopulations, have been used widely [42][43][44][45][46]. Nonetheless, none of them considers the passive vector transport (dispersion process of invasive species associated with human activities) or its dynamic populations, under different biogeographical conditions; therefore, an option is to include a meta-population model in differential equations, where each local population includes a structured model on age for the dynamic population of Ae.…”