UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING Searching for the optimal control strategy of epidemics spreading on different types of networks

We present a model of disease transmission on a regular and small world network and compare different control options.Comparison is based on a total cost of epidemic, including cost of palliative treatment of ill individuals and preventive costaimed at vaccination or culling of susceptible individuals. Disease is characterized by pre-symptomatic phase, which makesdetection and control difficult. Three general strategies emerge: global preventive treatment, local treatment within aneighborhood of certain size and only palliative treatment with no prevention. While the choice between the strategiesdepends on a relative cost of palliative and preventive treatment, the details of the local strategy and, in particular, the sizeof the optimal treatment neighborhood depend on the epidemiological factors. The required extent of prevention isproportional to the size of the infection neighborhood, but depends on time till detection and time till treatment in a non-nonlinear (power) law. The optimal size of control neighborhood is also highly sensitive to the relative cost, particularly forinefficient detection and control application. These results have important consequences for design of prevention strategiesaiming at emerging diseases for which parameters are not nessecerly known in advance. Citation: Oleś K, Gudowska-Nowak E, Kleczkowski A (2012) Understanding Disease Control: Influence of Epidemiological and Economic Factors. PLoS ONE 7(5):e36026. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036026 Editor: Yamir Moreno, University of Zaragoza, Spain Received October 3, 2011; Accepted March 26, 2012; Published May 9, 2012 Copyright: ! 2012 Oleś et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricteduse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Project operated within the Foundation for Polish Science International Ph.D. Projects Programme co-financed by the European Regional DevelopmentFund covering, under the agreement no. MPD/2009/6, the Jagiellonian University International Ph.D. Studies in Physics of Complex Systems. The project wascarried out within the MPD programme "Physics of Complex Systems" of the Foundation for Polish Science and cofinanced by the European Development Fund inthe framework of the "Innovative Economy Programme" and within the framework of "Exploring the Physics of Small Devices (EPSD)" of European ScienceFoundation (ESF). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected]