news, talks

EpiFor @ SIMID 2013 April 22, 2013

The EpiFor team contributed with three invited talks to the 4th Workshop on Simulation Models of Infectious Disease Transmission and Control Processes (SIMID) that took place in Antwerp, Belgium, from April 17 to 18, 2013.

The two day workshop was organized as a joint effort by the Universiy of Antwerp and the University of Hasselt and covered topics such as immunology, social contact data, seasonal influenza modelling, transmission models for bacteria and its relation to resistance, ethics of vaccination policy and the economic evaluation of vaccination programs. A whole session of workshop was devoted to metapopulation models and their application in epidemic modeling and it featured three invited talks by three members of the EpiFor team.

Michele Tizzoni presented a talk titled Real-time numerical forecasts of global epidemic spreading: case study of 2009 A/H1N1 pdm descrbing the results obtained by the GLEAM model during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and recently published in BMC Medicine.

iVittoria at SIMIDn her talk titled Host mobility drives pathogen competition in spatially structured populations, Chiara Poletto described some recent results on the interaction between the biologic characteristics of influenza virus strains and the host mobility.

The talk Age-specific contacts and travel patterns in the spatial spread of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic by Vittoria Colizza focused on the role of age-structure to explain the differences in the impact of the 2009 pandemic in different countries. As described by the paper recenlty published in BMC Infectious Diseases, the age-related differences in contact and travel behavior could explain why some countries where affected earlier than others during the pandemic outbreak.