Monitoring the Path to the Elimination of Infectious Diseases.

ABSTRACT: During the endgame of elimination programs, parasite populations may exhibit dynamical phenomena not typical of endemic disease. Particularly, monitoring programs for tracking infection prevalence may be hampered by overall rarity, the sporadic and unpredictable timing and location of outbreaks, and under-reporting. A particularly important problem for monitoring is determining the distance that must be covered to achieve the elimination threshold at an effective reproduction number less than one. In this perspective, we suggest that this problem may be overcome by measuring critical slowing down. Critical slowing down is a phenomenon exhibited by nonlinear dynamical systems in the vicinity of a critical threshold. In infectious disease dynamics, critical slowing down is expressed as an in

SUBMITTER: Drake JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6082106 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature