The Slowing of Madagascar’s Plague Epidemic
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/plague-madagascar-slowing/en/
The article from the World Health Organization describes current status of the plague epidemic and the general countermeasures that were taken to fight the spread of the plague.
The outbreak started at the beginning of August this year. To date, 2348 cases were identified and treated, including 202 deaths. To combat the disease health officials focused on treating the infected directly, identifying and treating infected individuals contacts, rodent and flee control, and strengthening seaport and airport screening the keep the disease contained within Madagascar. In recent weeks, containment efforts have resulted in a steady decrease in the infection rate and the number of ongoing cases. Health officials will continue to screen at ports and search out new cases to treat those individuals and their contacts.
The methods used to combat the spread of the disease draw many parallels to concepts introduced in class with respect to diffusion thresholds and epidemics. The spread of a disease through a population can be modelled on a social network. Individuals in the population can be represented as nodes and interactions between those individuals are the edges. Furthermore, a given node’s set of contacts are all the nodes that share in edge with that specific node.
To prevent the spread of a disease across the network, the infected portion of the network must be isolated/removed from the rest of the healthy network. The edges of “social interaction” must be broken to prevent further spread of the disease. So, when some individual is found to be infected they are treated and removed from the network. As a precaution, their set of contacts are treated in the same manner. This is a preemptive measure in case any member of the infected individual’s contacts interacted with the infected before they were isolated from the rest of the network.
The screening at airports and seaports is another level of isolation just on a larger scale. It is meant to isolate the disease just to Madagascar and prevent the epidemic from becoming an international issue.