Overview

Various control strategies, such as vaccination, have already made an appearance throughout the course. In this module, we will take a focused look at infectious disease control strategies and investigate some further topics related to control.

Learning Objectives

  • Know the major types of ID control strategies
  • Evaluate the use of different ID control strategies
  • Understand how different pathogens require different types of control

Reading

Start by reading the “Infectious Disease Control” chapter of IDEMAB.

A few weeks ago, you read the paper Modelling an outbreak of an emerging pathogen by Kajita et al (2007). Back then, we hadn’t discussed some topics mentioned in the paper, e.g. the reproductive number and how it relates to infectious disease control. Now (or after you worked through the DSAIDE apps for this module) might be a good time to revisit the paper, give it another read-through and see how much more you can understand. There are still some parts, e.g. the somewhat complicated way to get the reproductive number, that are beyond what will cover in this course, but you will likely be able to understand several parts of the paper better now than a few weeks ago.

Videos

Introduction Video

Rachel Smith provides an overview and introduction to the topic of ID control.

Impact of ID control

In these 2 videos, Matt Ferrari discusses the impact of vaccines and general ID control.

The anti-vaccination movement

While the whole issue of getting people to go along with ID control measures, such as vaccination (or wearing masks), is an important problem, it is somewhat outside the scope of this course. We’ll therefore not go much deeper into issues surrounding human behavior related to ID control. But for some - fairly lighthearted - content regarding vaccination, check out these two short videos.

A funny video clip about anti-vaccine proponents made by Girl Pants Productions (who/whatever they are).

A short outreach video from PhD Comics describing vaccines and the problem with vaccine refusal.