Quasi-neutral theory of epidemic outbreaks

Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for "accidental pathogens" which leads to power-law distributed ou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2011-07, Vol.6 (7), p.e21946-e21946
Main Authors: Pinto, Oscar A, Muñoz, Miguel A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Bacteria
Biodiversity
Biogeography
Biology
Chemical reactions
Earthquakes
Ecology
Electric power distribution
Epidemics
Evolution
Genetics
Humans
Laws, regulations and rules
Measles
Medicine
Meningitis
Models, Biological
Outbreaks
Pathogens
Percolation
Phase transitions
Phenomenology
Physics
Population genetics
Scale invariance
Scaling
Theory
Time Factors
Tropical diseases
Whooping cough
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Summary:Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scale-free or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for "accidental pathogens" which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0021946