The cohort effect in childhood disease dynamics
1Department of Applied Mathematics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China hedaihai@gmail.com.
Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
|July 22, 2016
Summary
School cohort entry, where all children start school simultaneously, can alone create biennial epidemic patterns for childhood infectious diseases. This factor, along with school terms, significantly improves disease transmission models.
Area of Science:
- Epidemiology
- Mathematical Modeling
- Public Health
Background:
- School calendars influence childhood infectious disease seasonality in industrialized nations.
- The impact of simultaneous school cohort entry on disease dynamics is less understood than school term structures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of school cohort entry in generating epidemic patterns.
- To assess the combined effect of cohort entry and school terms on disease transmission models.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the standard susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model.
- Incorporated school cohort entry as a sudden influx of susceptible individuals.
- Compared model fits with and without cohort entry and school terms against observed measles data.
Main Results:
- School cohort entry alone can generate biennial epidemic patterns, mirroring measles incidence.
- Cohort entry leads to an annual decline in effective transmission, observed in real-world data.
- Models including both cohort entry and school terms provide a significantly better fit to measles data.
Conclusions:
- School cohort entry is a crucial, underappreciated factor in childhood infectious disease dynamics.
- Simultaneous entry significantly improves the accuracy of epidemiological models.
- While specific fits improve, the fundamental dynamics of SEIR models are robust to the source of periodic forcing.
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