Mathematics Colloquium



Department of Mathematics
University of Nebraska at Omaha


WHEN:
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 2:30 PM

WHERE:
Durham Science Center, Room 256

WHAT:


Dr. Gregg Hartvigsen

Associate Professor of Biology SUNY Geneseo


will give a talk on

Modeling influenza epidemics across small-world networks


ABSTRACT:
There is growing interest in understanding and controlling the spread of diseases through realistically structured host populations. I investigate how network structures, ranging from circulant, through small-world networks, to random networks, and five vaccination strategies, and vaccination effort interact to influence the proportion of the population infected, the size and timing of the epidemic peak, and the duration of the epidemic. On average, vaccinating hosts based on degree (hubs) resulted in the smallest epidemics while vaccinating hosts with the highest clustering coefficient resulted in the largest epidemics. Our model suggests how vaccinations might be implemented to minimize the extent of an epidemic (e.g., duration and total number infected) as well as the timing and number of hosts infected at a given time over a wide range of realistically-structured host networks. 


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