Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 3: Computational Biophysics (joint BP/DY)
DY 3.10: Talk
Monday, March 20, 2017, 12:15–12:30, ZEU 250
Modeling epidemic patterns of multiple diseases with short-term non-specific immunity — •Gorm Gruner Jensen1, Florian Uekermann1, Kim Sneppen1, and Lone Simonsen2 — 1Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen 2100-DK, Denmark — 2Department of public health, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, Copenhagen 1014-DK, Denmark
A number of common respiratory viruses cause seasonal epidemics in a particular sequential pattern. Seasonal drivers like reduced immune function in mid-winter have been proposed as a possible cause. While these drivers may be sufficient to explain mid-winter viruses such as influenza, it is not clear whether other viruses require different drivers to explain their occurrence in spring, summer or fall. Here we use a multi-disease model to explore the possibility that a short non-specific immunity explains their seasonal patterns as a consequence of interaction between the diseases rather than requiring multiple seasonal drivers or complex pairwise interaction.
In the presence of a single seasonal driver, working identically on all diseases, our model exhibits a variety of observed epidemic patterns, including ordered peaks of different diseases. As example for application to observed patterns, we show two disease simulations reproducing multiple features of the correlation between annual PIV-3 and biennial PIV-1 epidemic peaks.