Abstract
It is a common medical folk-practice for parents to encourage their children to contract certain infectious diseases while they are young. This folk-practice is controversial, in part, because it contradicts the long-term public health goal of minimizing disease incidence. We study an epidemiological model of infectious disease in an age-structured population where virulence is age-dependent and show that, in some cases, the optimal behavior will increase disease transmission. This provides a rigorous justification of the concept of "endemic stability," and demonstrates that folk-practices may have been historically justified.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2711-2722 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Bulletin of Mathematical Biology |
Volume | 69 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2007 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Neuroscience(all)
- Immunology
- Mathematics(all)
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
- Environmental Science(all)
- Pharmacology
- Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all)
- Computational Theory and Mathematics