Predicting the course of meningococcal disease outbreaks in closed subpopulations

A stochastic epidemic model was applied to meningococcal disease outbreaks in defined small populations such as military garrisons and schools. Mening ococci are spread primarily by asymptomatic carriers and only a small propo rtion of those infected develop invasive disease. Bayesian predictions of n umbers of invasive cases were developed, based on observed data using a sto chastic epidemic model. We used additional data sets to model both disease probability and duration of carriage. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling tec hniques were used to compute the full posterior distribution which summariz ed all information drawn together from multiple sources.