Pandemic influenza in Papua New Guinea: a modelling study comparison with pandemic spread in a developed country

Milne, George J; Baskaran, Pravin; Halder, Nilimesh; Karl, Stephan; Kelso, Joel

It is assumed that infectious transmission may occur when an infectious and susceptible individual came into contact during a simulation cycle. Following each contact a new infection state for the susceptible individual (either to remain susceptible or to become infected) will be randomly selected via a Bernoulli trial. Once infected, an individual progressed through a series of infection states according to a fixed timeline, taking then from a susceptible state, to an exposed state, to an infectious state and thence to an immune, recovered state. 5 The probability that an infectious individual would infect a susceptible individual was calculated using the following transmission function, which takes into account the disease infectivity of the infectious individual Ii and the susceptibility of susceptible individual Is , at the time of contact.