THRESHOLD PARAMETERS FOR EPIDEMICS IN DIFFERENT COMMUNITY SETTINGS

Threshold parameters of epidemic models play a central role in the ass essment of proposed control strategies for infectious diseases. They h ave been determined for numerous standard epidemic models. This paper points out, with several examples, that threshold parameters depend on the social setting of the community and the variations in the behavio r of the members of the community. Specifically, communities are consi dered in which individuals have fixed patterns of behavior or random p atterns of behavior as well as communities of households with fixed or random patterns of behavior. A threshold parameter is computed for ea ch of the different settings. Some comparisons are made to provide ins ights into the effects that social settings and behavior changes have on the threshold parameters.