The economics of HIV interventions mean that, as we begin to see downturns in infection levels, now is the time to invest; the interventions we need would not be possible if we returned to a phase of rapid epidemic growth.
With rapid epidemic growth, the difference of one week is likely to account for a difference of perhaps 2-8-fold.
Our goal was to evaluate the dynamics at work that resulted in rapid epidemic growth during the period observed.
Use of an exponential distribution, as is extremely common in SIR compartmental simulations, shows a much more rapid epidemic, with Gompertz and Weibull distributions showing more gradual epidemic evolution.
The revised International Health Regulations 2005 included dengue as a disease that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern with implications for health security due to disruption and rapid epidemic spread beyond national borders [ 5].
With enhanced surveillance, these laboratories should be able to rapidly confirm or rule out influenza as the cause of a cluster of severe respiratory illness, which would allow for rapid epidemic responses.
By the end of April, both growth models fail to estimate r0 with sufficient precision to discriminate between slow and rapid epidemic growth because of the small number of sequences sampled.
We observed in particular that the lengths of shortening the infectious and latent periods resulted in more rapid epidemic growth and larger final outbreak sizes for a given value of R0, due to the shorter window of opportunity for vaccination to have an effect.
Our results suggest that more severe outcomes observed in the 2009 influenza A H1N1 pandemic in remote and isolated communities 2 may have been due to differential transmissibility of infection, resulting in more rapid epidemic spread and larger numbers of individuals affected at northern latitudes.
