Mitigation Strategies for Pandemic Influenza A: Balancing Conflicting Policy Objectives

Mitigation Strategies for Pandemic Influenza A: Balancing Conflicting Policy Objectives

Mitigation of a severe influenza pandemic can be achieved using a range of interventions to reduce transmission. Interventions can reduce the impact of an outbreak and buy time until vaccines are developed, but they may have high social and economic costs. The non-linear effect on the epidemic dynamics means that suitable strategies crucially depend on the precise aim of the intervention. Natio...

Balancing Conflicting Policy Objectives: The Case of School Finance Reform

Mitigation strategies for pandemic influenza in the United States.

Recent human deaths due to infection by highly pathogenic (H5N1) avian influenza A virus have raised the specter of a devastating pandemic like that of 1917-1918, should this avian virus evolve to become readily transmissible among humans. We introduce and use a large-scale stochastic simulation model to investigate the spread of a pandemic strain of influenza virus through the U.S. population ...

Cost-effectiveness of Pharmaceutical- based Pandemic Influenza Mitigation Strategies

The states are vector structures containing 12 elements representing 3 possible vaccination groups (no-vaccine (i=1), pre-vaccine and matched vaccine (i=2) or matched vaccine only (i=3)) and 3 population groups (0-19 years (j=1), 20-64 years (j=2), and 65+ (j=3)). Susceptible states, for example, can be written as Si, i,j=1..3. The parameters ω and γ were fixed constants representing the rate o...

Rescinding Community Mitigation Strategies in an Influenza Pandemic

Using a networked, agent-based computational model of a stylized community, we evaluated thresholds for rescinding 2 community mitigation strategies after an influenza pandemic. We ended child sequestering or all-community sequestering when illness incidence waned to thresholds of 0, 1, 2, or 3 cases in 7 days in 2 levels of pandemic severity. An unmitigated epidemic or strategy continuation fo...