Cellular Automaton Model for Epidemiology with Vaccination Strategy
S. Rajasekaran · International Journal of Infectious Diseases · 2008
Vaccintion plays a vital role in controlling infectious diseases.This paper presents the spatial and temporal rates of disease spread in a spatially distributed heterogeneous population with vaccination using lattice gas cellular automata(LGCA).This model describes the scenarios of ring vaccination,which is more effective if the infectious cases are diagnosed rapidly.Expressions for the basic reproduction number and effective reproduction number have been derived which help to find the critical vaccination coverage needed to control the epidemic.We investigate the effectiveness of ring vaccination depends on the time until diagnosis of a symptomatic case, the time to identify and vaccinate contacts.However, because of the inherent stochastic nature of the epidemic outbreaks, both the size and duration of the epidemic outbreaks highly vary.A special strategy that includes case isolation is discussed and sensitvity analysis is carried out to understand the initial phase of the epidemic.Specifically, how a ring of vaccinated susceptible population of sufficient thickness can halt the spread of infection across space is analyzed.This model can also incorporate geography, demography, and environment and migration pattern into the interaction measure between cells on a global neighborhood level.Hence LGCA model is more flexible to determine the effect of vaccination in epidemic spread through simulation using several simplified data.