EPIDEMIOLOGY OF COMMUNICABLE DISEASE IN SMALL POPULATIONS

We have recently shown how the outbreaks of measles virus infection in small isolated island communities exhibit an organised pattern in the distribution of epidemic sizes and distribution of epidemic durations . More conventional epidemiological analysis tends not to be useful in such highly intermittent dynamical regimes when there is frequent fad e-out of infection. In this paper we discuss how our approach can be a pplied to an analysis of measles epidemics in highly vaccinated commun ities where susceptibles build up due to lack of vaccine uptake and al so because of occasional vaccine failure.