The complex and unprecedented Ebola epidemic ongoing in West Africa has highlighted the need to review the epidemiological characteristics of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) as well as our current understanding of the transmission dynamics and the effect of control interventions against Ebola transmission. Here we review key epidemiological data from past Ebola outbreaks and carry out a comparative r...

Several West African countries - Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - experienced significant morbidity and mortality during the largest Ebola epidemic to date, from late 2013 through 2015. The extent of the epidemic was fueled by outbreaks in large urban population centers as well as movement of the pathogen between populations. During the epidemic there was no known vaccine or drug, so effectiv...

Many countries have implemented strategies to control and eradicate epidemic diseases. These strategies are usually based on either stamping-out or routine vaccination, sometimes complemented by emergency vaccination. The authors describe these strategies, using examples to illustrate each one. The economic evaluation of control and eradication of epidemic diseases is a complex matter. The auth...

A central question in drug policy is how control efforts should be divided among enforcement, treatment, and prevention. Of particular interest is how the mix should vary dynamically over the course of an epidemic. Recent work considered how various pairs of these interventions interact. This paper considers all three simultaneously in a dynamic optimal control framework, yielding some surprisi...

A simplified susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) epidemic model and a small-world model are applied to analyse the spread and control of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) for Hong Kong in early 2003. From data available in mid April 2003, we predict that SARSwould be controlled by June and nearly 1700 persons would be infected based on the SIR model. This is consistent with the known da...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has been the first severe contagious disease to emerge in the 21st century. The available epidemic curves for SARS show marked differences between the affected regions with respect to the total number of cases and epidemic duration, even for those regions in which outbreaks started almost simultaneously and similar control measures were implemented at th...

In this paper, we explore control theory as a solution to stop epidemic outbreaks in networks. Control theory deals with the behavior of dynamical systems, specifically networks in this case. We investigate the process of finding sets of nodes required to control a network, and applying an input to these nodes in order to drive the system from a given state to another. We explore the task of mi...

When there are many people who don't need to expect something more than the benefits to take, we will suggest you to have willing to reach all benefits. Be sure and surely do to take this curbing the epidemic governments and the economics of tobacco control that gives the best reasons to read. When you really need to get the reason why, this curbing the epidemic governments and the economics of...

Malaria epidemics have recently occurred in many areas of the world, particularly in the irregular fringe, along the limits of distribution of malaria endemicity, whether the limiting factors are temperature (latitude or altitude) or relative humidity (deserts), which were the scene of the major epidemics of the past. A review is made of the current approaches to epidemic prevention and control...

We present an analysis of the current foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in Great Britain over the first 2 months of the spread of the virus. The net transmission potential of the pathogen and the increasing impact of control measures are estimated over the course of the epidemic to date. These results are used to parameterize a mathematical model of disease transmission that captures the differin...