Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Date
Number of Fatal Attacks
Deaths
August 29
1
1
August 30
8
2
August 31
56
3
September 1
143
70
September 2
116
127
September 3
54
76
September 4
46
71
September 5
36
45
September 6
20
37
September 7
28
32
September 8
12
30
September 9
11
24
September 10
5
18
September 11
5
15
September 12
1
6
TABLE 2-1.
Cases of fatal cholera and cholera deaths in the vicinity of the Broad Street water pump, 1854.
(Excerpted from Snow [1855].)
transmitted by objects used by an infected person. Others, such as the
malaria protozoan or the West Nile virus, are transmitted by insects. Still
others are communicated by direct contact between infected individuals
and susceptible individuals.
The duration, severity, and recurrence of epidemics may also vary
widely. Some epidemics, such as the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918,
may develop rapidly, spreading terrible destruction within months and
then tapering off (see Figure 2-1). Others may recur with relative
regularity, as illustrated by the weekly case notification records of
measles in England and Wales before mass vaccination was initiated (see
Figure 2-2).
Despite the early work by Daniel Bernoulli, mathematicians were not
seriously engaged in the fight against infectious diseases during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early twentieth century, the
British bacteriologist Ronald Ross (1857-1932) used mathematical
modeling in his work with malaria and, more generally, in studying the
spread of an infectious disease. Ross received the Nobel Prize in 1902.
The now classical works (Kermack and McKendrick [1927; 1932; 1933])
built upon Ross's studies and examined the questions of when a disease
will spread and how to find the threshold of an epidemic. In this text, it
would be impossible to cover even a fraction of the literature on
modeling infectious diseases that is available today.
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