Incorporating Equity in Infectious Disease Modeling: Measles
2021
Deterministic compartmental models of infectious diseases like measles typically reflect biological heterogeneities in the risk of infection and severity to characterize transmission dynamics. Given the known association of socioeconomic status and increased vulnerability to infection and mortality, it is also critical that such models further incorporate social heterogeneities.
This article explores the influence of integrating income-associated differences in parameters of traditional dynamic transmission models. The authors developed a measles “SIR” model, in which the Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered classes were stratified by income quintile.
The incorporation of income-specific differences can reveal distinct outbreak patterns across income groups and important differences in the subsequent effects of preventative interventions like vaccination. This case study highlights the need to extend traditional modeling frameworks (e.g., SIR models) to be stratified by socioeconomic factors such as income, and to consider ensuing income-associated differences in disease-related morbidity and mortality. In so doing, the authors build on existing tools and characterize ongoing challenges in achieving health equity.
Incorporating Equity in Infectious Disease Modeling: Measles
Source:
Menkir TF, Jbaily A, Verguet S. Incorporating Equity in Infectious Disease Modeling: Case Study of a Distributional Impact Framework for Measles Transmission. Vaccine 2021; 39 (21): 2894-2900. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2021.03.023