Modeling the Spread of Preventable Diseases: Social Culture and Epidemiology

Tawfik, Ahmed Y.; Farag, Rana R.

This paper uses multiagent simulation to examine the effect of various awareness interventions on the spread of preventable diseases in a society. The work deals with the interplay between knowledge diffusion and the spreading of these preventable infections in the population. The knowledge diffusion model combines information acquisition through education, personal experiences, and the spreading of information through a scale-free social network. A conditional probability model is used to model the interdependence between the risk of infection and the level of health awareness acquired. The model is applied to study the spread of HIV/Aids, malaria, and tuberculosis in the South African province Limpopo. The simulation results show that the effect of various awareness interventions can be very different and that a concerted effort to spread health awareness through various channels is more likely to control the spread of these preventable infections in a reasonable time.