Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 20: Focus Session: Complex Contagion Phenmomena (joint session SOE/ DY/ BP)

DY 20.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 12:15–12:30, MA 001

Virus transmission on a network of injecting drug users — •Cornelia Metzig and Peter White — Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial Collge London, UK

The Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a virus that is most prevalent among injecting drug users, who transmit the virus by sharing their injecting equipment, a problem that receives much attention from healthcare providers. Several studies investigate the topology of drug injecting partners via snowball sampling methods with the goal of describing a static network. Typical networks are reported to be highy clustered, assortive and heavy-tailed in degree distribution. Transmission dynamics of the virus can be described by SIR or SIS-models, depending whether treatment is considered.

In addition, virus transmission is affected by (i) change in sharing partners, and (ii) entry and exit from the community, which happen at shorter timescales than the duration of an untreated infection is. These phenomena can be captured in a network model where each connection describes only one sharing event. Simultaneous rewiring of the network and transmission are studied theoretically and numerically in a model. Assumptions on the network, HCV-incidence rate and HCV-prevalence are compared to data on drug users from the UK.